Daniel Jacob | University of Freiburg Center for Cognitive
Science
Lars Konieczny | University of Freiburg Center for Cognitive
Science
Standard theories of focus expressed by cleft structures,
for instance (Beaver & Clark
2008; Krifka
2007), assume that the motivation for the use of focus is
discourse relevance: focus establishes an
answer to the question under discussion (Roberts 2004: 216). This
account, however, lacks a theory of how alternative sets are
generated in real discourse. We present a study in the
non-cumulative self-paced reading moving-window paradigm that
tackles this problem by measuring how manipulating the context
preceding German es-clefts influences alternative
generation. Our results illustrate the interplay between discourse
relevance and individual relevance in this process, in that cleft
sentences only receive a contrastive focal reading in contexts where
the readers are in a position to previously generate an alternative
set.
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2023. Non-Canonical Questions,
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