Part of
Experimental Linguistics: Integration of theories and applicationsEdited by Gary D. Prideaux, Bruce L. Derwing and Will Baker
[Studies in the Sciences of Language Series 3] 1980
► pp. 185–201
Paraphrase relations among defied sentences were examined using the syntactic cohesion between question and answer as an experimental paradigm. It was assumed that paraphrase sets would be defined by the syntactic reflexes of the semantic notion of focus. Subjects were 77 High School seniors and juniors. The focus hypothesis was generally supported, but there were two groups of subjects who differed from the majority in either not maintaining focus across all sentence-types, or in apparently not utilising focus at all.