In this paper, we investigate focus markers in Catalan that can take on discourse-particle readings. We focus on two Catalan elements that have not been studied from a formal linguistics perspective so far: the focus adverb precisament ‘precisely’ and the focus particle també ‘also’. We demonstrate that these elements feature interpretations that we identify as a type of meaning familiar from discourse particles in languages other than Catalan. After having outlined the basic distribution and interpretative effects of these particles, we analyze the semantics and pragmatics of precisament and també within a probabilistic argumentative framework, and we then conclude the paper by comparing the observations and analyses we have pointed out for Catalan to other languages that feature a discourse-particle reading of similar focus markers.

The semantics of focus particles like only requires a set of alternatives (Rooth, 1992). In two experiments, we investigated the impact of such particles on the retrieval of alternatives that are mentioned in the prior context or unmentioned. The first experiment used a probe recognition task and showed that focus particles interfere with the recognition of mentioned alternatives and the rejection of unmentioned alternatives relative to a condition without a particle. A second lexical decision experiment demonstrated priming effects for mentioned and unmentioned alternatives (compared with an unrelated condition) while focus particles caused additional interference effects. Overall, our results indicate that focus particles trigger an active search for alternatives and lead to a competition between mentioned alternatives, unmentioned alternatives, and the focused element.

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.