As we saw above, work on the processing of CFs has shown that the processing of contrast involves the activation of contrastive alternatives, although questions pertaining to the time course of activating alternatives and the exact nature of these alternatives during incremental processing have not be resolved in the literature. To my knowledge, the online processing of CT structures has not been explicitly studied, although there is psycholinguistic work on “contrastive sentences” (Lee and Lee, 2005), on “multiple topic” contexts (Hoeks et al. 2002, discussed in more detail in Chapter 5), and on topicality more broadly (e.g. Wang and Schumacher 2013; Burmester et al. 2014). In the present work, I am thus building on previous findings on the processing of CFs.
First, as a notational note – in the following, I use the label ct for a CT-marked
constituent and the labelctfor a member of ct’s set of contrastive alternatives. While a CT may have multiple contextually salient alternatives, for the sake of simplicity I assume that a single contextually relevant alternative is sufficient to license the use of a CT structure. Some researchers have argued that CT structure triggers an automatic “reverse po-
12There are culturally specific associations like “Ben and Jerry” for the ice-cream and “Tom and Jerry”
larity inference”13 (Krifka, 1998; Lee, 1999; Oshima, 2005; Hara, 2006), that is, the con-
trastive alternative and its contrastive relationship toct(such as occurring in information-
structurally parallel clauses of the opposite polarity) can be inferred. For instance, in (57), the reverse polarity inference would be that Mari did not eat cake. One criticism of the reversed polarity account is that it doesn’t take into consideration the Focus structure of the clause. In this particular case, ct (Mari) could also contrast with ct (Anna) in virtue
of differing in the Focus value of the clause, yielding the inference that Mari ate something other than cake.
(57) Q: What did Anna and Mari eat? A: AnnaCT ate cakeF 14
Reversed polarity inference: ¬(Mari ate cake.) Contrastive inference: Mari atex s.t. x 6= cake.
The variability of possible inferences in a CT structure results in an asymmetry between CTs and CFs, and I argue that there is a pragmatic reason for actively maintaining potential CT alternatives in memory. Following Grice (1975), comprehenders expect utterances to be informative and bring the interlocutors closer to the conversational goal. I will show that the use of a CT structure does not rule out that the proposition that is stated to apply to ct
does not apply to its CT alternatives. As a result, explicitly stating ct and whether the
relevant proposition (“x ate cake” in 57) applies to ct or not ends up being informative.
To illustrate, let us look at the case of the exclusive focus particle only in (58). As only is taken to overtly15 entail or presuppose the exclusion of focus alternatives (Ippolito,
13An implicature or a presupposition, depending on the author.
14Whether this utterance implies that Mari ate anything is partially influenced by the scope of focus –
when only the object “cake” is focused, “ate” is backgrounded and not felicitously substituted with another predicate in any parallel clause about Mari (but of course, one could utter “And Mari ate NOTHING”). When the focused constituent is “ate cake”, the implication that Mari ate something is weakened. As discussed in Section 2.1.1, prosody in examples like this underdetermines the scope of Focus.
15Some analyses of Focus, e.g. Kiss (1998), postulate a silent exhaustivity operator that is similar in its
semantics to only, but the intended type of focus (CF vs Informational Focus, see B¨uring 2016) can be difficult to communicate to comprehenders unambiguously when an overt particle is not used. This possibly
2008), answer (58a) is as informative as (58b), where the exclusivity inference is made overt by spelling out the focus alternative and the proposition applying to it. This is because the entailment (that no other conference guest stayed at the hotel) is necessarily true and cannot be canceled, as shown by the infelicity of (58c). When reading or hearing (58a), comprehenders may activate the entailment that no other conference guest besides Anna stayed at the hotel. Conceptually, the activation of this alternative does not mean that the processor is expecting it to be overtly spelled out, as shown in (58b). For a speaker to produce the focus alternative (“nobody else”) overtly as in (58b) would violate the Gricean maxims of Manner and Quantity – (58a) and (58b) convey identical semantic content, which shows that (58b) does not convey the message in the briefest possible way.
(58) Which of the conference guests stayed at the hotel? a. Only AnnaCF stayed at the hotel.
b. Only AnnaCF stayed at the hotel. Nobody else did.
c. # Only AnnaCF stayed at the hotel. In fact, MaryCF did too.
Now consider the CT example in (59). We see that the overtly spelled out full response (59b) is more informative than just the statement including ct (‘Anna’) in (59a). This is because the polarity-reversed inference (“Everybody else didn’t”)16is not necessarily true – it can actually be canceled by using the additive particle “too” as shown in (59c).17 Thus,
ct
(Mary)and the proposition conveyed by the clause it occurs in are not redundant. During incremental processing, a comprehender may thus expect ct and the proposition applying
to it to be explicitly spelled out.
(59) Did the conference guests stay at the hotel?
contributes to diminished or delayed effects of contrast in the absence of an overt focus particle in some prior studies (e.g. Paterson et al. 2007; Spalek et al. 2014).
16Note that since CT structure presupposes the existence of contextually salient alternatives, ‘nobody’ is
not a felicitous subject here. Instead, ‘everyone’ is used along with sentential negation.
a. AnnaCT did.
b. AnnaCT did. [Everybody else]CT didn’t.
c. AnnaCT did. In fact, [everybody else]CT did too.
Prediction here takes the form of (partial) preactivation (see Kuperberg and Jaeger 2016) – the processing of an overt ct is facilitated once encountered, as the discourse represen- tation has already been partially updated. Another component of predicting an upcoming contrastive alternative is that the content conveyed by the clause containing the alternative should not be redundant, as was exemplified in (58). Namely, a structure or interpretation may be activated before it is encountered, without it having been predicted in a true sense of the word. This is due to a preference against redundancy in language, as documented for instance for referential forms – as Arnold (2010) illustrates with the example in (60), a particular linguistic form (the full DP “Elsi”) may be activated and made highly salient by the context, but be judged as unnatural or inappropriate when encountered (here, in the second sentence and definitely in the third).
(60) Elsi called Sarah. Elsi asked lots of questions. Elsi told Sarah lots of funny stories too.
As CTs are used in structures conveying partial answers to a salient discourse question, the clause containing ctby definition does not fully answer the question under discussion.
A clause containing ct would thus convey an informative proposition, while the same is
not always true in CF constructions. To summarize, we see an asymmetry between CTs and CFs as there are pragmatic grounds to activate CT alternatives and anticipate them in the discourse, if not previously encountered. There isn’t a semantic reason for CT alternatives to be suppressed in online processing the way that CF alternatives may be (Washburn, 2013).18
Before laying out our hypotheses for the incremental processing of CT constructions, let us consider different possible configurations between ct and ct in text.
18Some theoreticians have defined CTs as involving a change to the discourse topic (e.g. ¨Ozkan Grigora¸s
2020), which implicitly assumes that the previous topic is overridden (and perhaps deactivated in processing), but as laid out in Chapter 2, this is not the approach I adopt here.