Doctoral Dissertation Research. Generating Alternatives: Processing Focus Structure in Discourse

University Of Rochester, Rochester NY

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation research is an experimental investigation of the processing strategies people use to understand utterances containing focus particles. The meaning contribution of the focus-sensitive particle "only" in a sentence like "Natalie only met LUCY" has two components under standard assumptions. First, there is the meaning of the sentence without "only", Natalie's meeting of Lucy. Second, there is the restriction due to the focus particle that no alternative to the focus value associated with "only" makes the sentence true, Natalie did not meet anyone other than Lucy. As is well known, the meanings of such sentences are highly context-dependent. The context determines which alternatives the sentence is interpreted with respect to. This research investigates the contextual factors that influence a listener's consideration of alternatives in real time, in other words, how comprehenders figure out which alternatives are most likely, given the various information sources available to them. The experiments will use a lightweight head-mounted eye tracker to monitor eye movements as participants identify an object in a scene while listening to sentences containing focus-sensitive elements (e.g., "Natalie only bought an APPLE"). Which objects participants look at, and when they look at them, provides evidence about which referents they are considering as likely alternatives as they interpret the sentence. By manipulating the availability of different information types available in the visual or linguistic context, one can ask to what extent each of these potential information sources helps the listener restrict the domain of alternatives to the point that the single intended referent can be picked out. The research described here is notably interdisciplinary: the questions are motivated by theoretical linguistics and studied using methodologies from experimental psychology. This research in particular will be informative to both cognitive scientists, in that it extends the accumulating body of work on incremental language processing and the contextual sources of linguistic expectations, and theoretical linguists, by addressing and providing experimental data regarding the very general problem of domain restriction. The research will actively involve undergraduates in scientific research, increasing the likelihood that they will pursue graduate training in the sciences.