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

本论文的研究是对人们理解含有焦点助词的话语时所使用的加工策略的实验研究。在标准假设下，焦点敏感助词“only”在像“Natalie only met LUCY”这样的句子中的意义贡献有两个组成部分。第一，没有“only”的句子的意思，娜塔莉与露西的相遇。第二，由于焦点助词的限制，与“only”相关联的焦点值没有替代项使句子为真，Natalie没有遇到Lucy以外的任何人。众所周知，这类句子的意义高度依赖于上下文。上下文决定了句子是根据哪些选择来解释的。本研究探讨了影响听者在真实的时间内对备选方案的考虑的语境因素，换句话说，听者如何在各种信息来源的情况下确定哪些备选方案最有可能。这些实验将使用一个轻型的头戴式眼动仪来监测眼睛的运动，因为参与者在听包含焦点敏感元素的句子时识别场景中的物体（例如，“娜塔莉只买了一个苹果。参与者看到的物体以及他们看到的时间，提供了他们在解释句子时认为哪些参考是可能的替代品的证据。通过操纵视觉或语言语境中不同信息类型的可用性，人们可以问，这些潜在信息源中的每一个在多大程度上帮助听者限制选择的范围，使其能够挑出单一的预期指称。这里描述的研究是值得注意的跨学科：问题的动机是理论语言学和研究方法从实验心理学。这项研究尤其对认知科学家和理论语言学家都有重要意义，前者扩展了关于增量语言处理和语言期望的语境来源的积累，后者通过解决和提供关于域限制这一非常普遍的问题的实验数据。这项研究将积极参与科学研究的本科生，增加他们将追求在科学研究生培训的可能性。

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.