The Role of Only in Contrasts In and Out of Context

Abstract

Three self-paced reading experiments explored the processing of only and its interaction with context. In isolated sentences, the focus particle only predicts an upcoming contrast. Ambiguous replacive sentences (e.g., “The curator embarrassed the gallery owner in public, not the artist”) with only on the subject or object showed faster reading of the contrast phrase (“not the artist”) than without it. The position of only also influenced the phrase's meaning; despite a bias toward object contrasts, subject only increased subject interpretations. If preceding context provides another reason for the focus particle, it no longer predicts an upcoming contrast. In biasing contexts including indirect questions, there was no facilitation when only marked the argument that answered the question, whereas only on the other argument slowed processing. Both only and context influenced interpretation. The results show that focus particles and questions can each influence processing of an upcoming contrast on- and off-line.

Acknowledgments

I thank Catherine Anderson and Michael Walsh Dickey for assistance in setting up and running the experiments, Chuck Clifton for assistance with the data analysis and revision of the article, and several anonymous reviewers for their recommendations. All errors are the responsibility of the author. Portions of this research have been presented at the 2004 Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, the 2004 Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing, and the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. This research was partially supported by a KBRIN-AREA grant from the KBRIN-INBRE program funded by NIH.

Notes

¹ When the few nonconforming items were removed from the by-items analysis of residual reading times, the results of both Experiments 2 and 3 remained the same. The same patterns of means were observed, and the significance of comparisons was reduced only slightly.