What is it about?
How do different types of focus expressions differ with respect to exhaustivity? This study investigates the associations between the concept of exhaustivity and three focus types in Chinese (wh, cleft, and only) using a trichotomous-response design in two experiments: a forced-choice judgment and a self-paced reading experiment, both with adult native speakers.
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Why is it important?
The results show that whether engaged in conscious decision-making or an implicit comprehension process, the participants distinguished only-focus and cleft-focus from wh-focus clearly, and also that there are specific differences between only-focus and cleft-focus in conscious decision-making. The potential linguistic levels that exhaustivity encodes in Chinese cleft-focus render it more similar to only-focus than to wh-focus.
Perspectives
I worked on this topic due mostly to a simple inquiry: whether semantic and pragmatic concepts could be distinguished during online language comprehension. This study investigated theoretical concerns and issues that were previously controversial but its results shed some light on how the experimental method may provide a more direct and robust investigation of perplexing linguistic phenomena.
Yu-Yin Hsu
Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Associations between focus constructions and levels of exhaustivity: An experimental investigation of Chinese, PLoS ONE, October 2019, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0223502.
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