Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T12:18:23.537Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Converging evidence for the relevance of alternative sets: data from NPs with focus sensitive particles in German

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2015

KATHARINA SPALEK Open the ORCID record for KATHARINA SPALEK [Opens in a new window]  and
AMIR ZELDES
KATHARINA SPALEK*
Affiliation:
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
AMIR ZELDES*
Affiliation:
Georgetown University
*
† Addresses for correspondence: Prof. Katharina Spalek, Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany; e-mail: katharina.spalek@staff.hu-berlin.de
‡ Prof. Amir Zeldes, Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University, 1421 37th St. NW, Washington, DC 20057, USA; e-mail: amir.zeldes@georgetown.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

abstract

Recent psycholinguistic studies on the reality of alternative sets in processing focus NPs have shown that focus particles like ‘only’ play a special role in activating the mental representation of alternatives to focused nouns. In this paper we present a new corpus study which provides converging evidence to support psycholinguistic findings and suggests that alternatives preceded by a focus particle are not only more activated in experimental contexts, but are also more likely to be discussed in the subsequent context. To this end we develop and evaluate inter-annotator agreement on two novel annotation tasks in naturally occurring German corpus data: recognition of nominal alternatives in general without any context, and recognition of alternatives in the context of sentence pairs. We show that while annotators agree poorly on the first, they agree strongly on the second. We also develop a concept of ‘alternative density’, the number of alternatives realized in a sentence following a target NP, and present a mixed-effects model showing a very significant rise in density after the presence of German nur ‘only’ independently of other factors.

Keywords

alternative semanticsinformation structureannotationfocus particlesalternative setsconverging evidencecorpus linguistics
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 24 - 51
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

references

Abdel Rahman, R., & Melinger, A. (2009). Semantic context effects in language production: a swinging lexical network proposal and a review. Language and Cognitive Processes, 24(5), 713–734.Google Scholar
Artstein, R., & Poesio, M. (2008). Inter-coder agreement for computational linguistics. Computational Linguistics, 34(4), 556–596.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baroni, M., Bernardini, S., Ferraresi, A., & Zanchetta, E. (2009). The WaCky wide web: a collection of very large linguistically processed web-crawled corpora. Language Resources and Evaluation, 43(3), 209–226.Google Scholar
Barsalou, L. W. (1983). Ad hoc categories. Memory and Cognition, 11(3), 211–227.Google Scholar
Beaver, D. I., & Clark, B. Z. (2008). Sense and sensitivity: how focus determines meaning. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Braun, B., & Tagliapietra, L. (2010). The role of contrastive intonation contours in the retrieval of contextual alternatives. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25(7/8/9), 1024–1043.Google Scholar
Byram-Washburn, M. (2013). Narrowing the focus: experimental studies on exhaustivity and contrast. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Southern California. Online: <http://www-scf.usc.edu/∼byram/on the nature of the focus set of alternatives.pdf> (last accessed 13 July 2015).Google Scholar
Cutler, A., & Fodor, J. A. (1979). Semantic focus and sentence comprehension. Cognition, 7, 49–59.Google Scholar
Fraundorf, S. H., Watson, D. G., & Benjamin, A. S. (2010). Recognition memory reveals just how CONTRASTIVE contrastive accenting really is. Journal of Memory and Language, 63(3), 367–386.Google Scholar
Ganushchak, L. Y., Konopka, A. E., & Chen, Y. (2014). What the eyes say about planning of focused referents during sentence formulation: a cross-linguistic investigation. Frontiers in Psychology, 5: doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01124.Google Scholar
Gernsbacher, M. A., & Jescheniak, J. D. (1995). Cataphoric devices in spoken discourse. Cognitive Psychology, 29, 24–58.Google Scholar
Glenberg, A., Meyer, K., & Lindem, K. (1987). Mental models contribute to foregrounding in text comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 26, 69–83.Google Scholar
Gotzner, N. (2014). What’s included in the set of alternatives? Psycholinguistic evidence for a permissive view. In 19th Annual Conference Sinn und Bedeutung. Göttingen, Germany. Online: <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274706513_What%27s_included_in_the_set_of_alternatives_Psycholinguistic_evidence_for_a_permissive_view>.Google Scholar
Ito, K., & Speer, S. R. (2008). Anticipatory effects of intonation: eye movements during instructed visual search. Journal of Memory and Language, 58(2), 541–573.Google Scholar
Kaiser, E. (2010). Investigating the consequences of focus on the production and comprehension of referring expressions. International Review of Pragmatics, 2, 266–297.Google Scholar
Kim, C. (2012). Generating alternatives: interpreting focus in discourse. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Rochester.Google Scholar
König, E. (1991). The meaning of focus particles: a comparative perspective. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Krifka, M. (2008). Basic notions of information structure. Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 55, 243–276.Google Scholar
Ladd, D. R., & Schepman, A. (2003). ‘Sagging transitions’ between high pitch accents in English: experimental evidence. Journal of Phonetics, 31, 81–112.Google Scholar
Lüdeling, A., Ritz, J., Stede, M., & Zeldes, A. (to appear). Corpus linguistics and information structure research. In Féry, C. & Ichihara, S. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of information structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Norris, D., Cutler, A., McQueen, J. M., & Butterfield, S. (2006). Phonological and conceptual activation in speech comprehension. Cognitive Psychology, 53(2), 146–193.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, J. B., & Hirschberg, J. (1990). The meaning of intonational contours in the interpretation of discourse. In Cohen, P., Morgan, J., & Pollack, M. (Eds.), Intentions in communication (pp. 271–311). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Roberts, C. (1995). Domain restriction in dynamic semantics. In Bach, E., Jelinek, E., Kratzer, A., & Partee, B. H. (Eds.), Quantification in natural languages (pp. 661–700). Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Roberts, C. (2012). Information structure in discourse: towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. Semantics and Pragmatics, 5(6), 1–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rooth, M. (1985). Association with focus. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Rooth, M. (1992). A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, 1, 75–116.Google Scholar
Schiller, A., Teufel, S., Stöckert, C., & Thielen, C. (1999). Guidelines für das Tagging deutscher Textcorpora mit STTS. Stuttgart/Tübingen: Universität Stuttgart, Institut für maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung and Universität Tübingen, Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft.Google Scholar
Schmid, H. (1994). Probabilistic part-of-speech tagging using decision trees. In Proceedings of the Conference on New Methods in Language Processing (pp. 44–49). Manchester. Online: <http://www.cis.uni-muenchen.de/~schmid/tools/TreeTagger/data/tree-tagger1.pdf>.Google Scholar
Selkirk, E. (2002). Contrastive FOCUS vs. presentational focus: prosodic evidence from the right node raising in English. In Bel, B. & Marlin, I. (Eds.), Speech prosody 2002: Proceedings of the First International Speech Prosody Conference (pp. 643–646). Université de Provence: Laboratoire Parole et Langage.Google Scholar
Spalek, K., Gotzner, N., & Wartenburger, I. (2014). Not only the apples: focus sensitive particles improve memory for information-structural alternatives. Journal of Memory and Language, 70, 68–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stede, M. (2004). The Potsdam Commentary Corpus. In Webber, B. & Byron, D. K. (Eds.), Proceedings of the ACL-04 Workshop on Discourse Annotation (pp. 96–102). Barcelona, Spain.Google Scholar
van Leeuwen, T. M., Lamers, M. J. A., Petersson, K., M., Gussenhoven, C., Rietveld, T., Poser, B., & Hagoort, P. (2014). Phonological markers of information structure: an fMRI study. Neuropsychologia, 58, 64–74.Google Scholar
Watson, D. G., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Gunlogson, C. A. (2008). Interpreting pitch accents in online comprehension: H* vs. L+H*. Cognitive Science, 32, 1232–1244.Google Scholar
Weber, A., Braun, B., & Crocker, M. W. (2006). Finding referents in time: eye-tracking evidence for the role of contrastive accents. Language and Speech, 49(3), 367–392.Google Scholar