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Exploring the Role of Focus Alternatives in Language Production
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Exploring the Role of Focus Alternatives in Language Production

A special issue of Languages (ISSN 2226-471X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (28 February 2022) | Viewed by 6467

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Katharina Spalek

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of General Linguistics, Heinrich Heine University, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany
Interests: psycholinguistics; neurolinguistics; focus alternatives; language production; bilingualism

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Focus indicates the importance of alternatives for the interpretation of an utterance (Krifka, 2008; see also Rooth, 1992). As Miss Marple explains to a bemused inspector Craddock in Agatha Christie’s murder mystery A Murder is Announced, the utterance “[She]F wasn’t there” (focus markings added by me) means something quite different from “She wasn’t [there]F”, because in the first case, the speaker would have had a person fixed in her mind, whereas in the second, a place. In this particular case, it is important that the culprit was not in the drawing room as everyone had thought, but in the hallway, shooting the murder victim. “Drawing room” and “hallway” are relevant focus alternatives.

In the past decade, a lot of research has been done on the online activation of focus alternatives in language comprehension (see Braun and Tagliapietra, 2010, and Husband and Ferreira, 2016, for two seminal studies). By contrast, much less is known about the role of focus alternatives in language production. The purpose of this Special Issue is to shed more light on this. There are three areas in particular where focus alternatives affect language production: 1. Pronunciation: How a given word in an utterance is pronounced depends on the presence or absence of alternatives to this word’s referent in the preceding context (see, for example, Sudhoff, 2010; Grice, Ritter, Niemann, and Roettger, 2017), 2. Discourse content: A discourse will continue differently when alternatives have been introduced previously than when no salient alternatives are present (e.g., Spalek and Zeldes, 2017). 3. It is an open question what happens in the mind of speakers when they decide to focus a given referent. Will they also activate alternatives, just as their listeners do when they encounter the focused element?

We invite contributions using quantitative data to address questions concerning the influence of focus alternatives on the manner or content of language production or explorations on the online activation of focus alternatives during language production. 

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400–600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editor ([email protected]) or to the Languages editorial office ([email protected]). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editor for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

The tentative completion schedule is as follows:

  • Abstract submission deadline: 31 October 2021
  • Notification of abstract acceptance: 30 November 2021
  • Full manuscript deadline: 28 February 2022

References

Braun, B. & Tagliapietra, L. (2010). The role of contrastive intonation contours in the retrieval of contextual alternatives. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25, 1024-1043.

Christie, A. (1950). A murder is announced. London: William Collins & Sons.

Grice, M., Ritter, S., Niemann, H., & Roettger, T. B. (2017). Integrating the discreteness and continuity of intonational categories. Journal of Phonetics, 64, 90-107.

Husband, M. E., & Ferreira, F. (2016). The role of selection in the comprehension of focus alternatives. Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, 31, 217-235.

Krifka, M. (2008). Basic notions of information structure. Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 55, 243-276.

Rooth, M. (1992). A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, 1, 75-116.

Spalek, K., & Zeldes, A. (2017). Converging evidence for the relevance of alternative sets: Data from NPs with focus sensitive particles in German. Language and Cognition, 9, 24-51.   

Sudhoff, S. (2010). Focus particles and contrast in German. Lingua, 120, 1458-1475.

Prof. Dr. Katharina Spalek
Guest Editor

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • focus alternatives
  • language production
  • phonetics
  • prosody
  • discourse
  • corpus
  • online processing

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

14 pages, 1391 KiB  
Article
The Influence of Focus on the Activation of Alternatives in Speech Production—An Online Picture-Word-Interference Experiment
by Beate Bergmann, Yanru Lu and Katharina Spalek
Languages 2023, 8(2), 110; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8020110 - 19 Apr 2023
Viewed by 1543
Abstract
In previous picture naming tasks, semantically related distractor words (co-hyponyms to the target word) induce interference, which is usually taken as evidence for lexical competition. In an online picture-word-interference experiment, we showed that distractor words that share a feature with the target (here: [...] Read more.
In previous picture naming tasks, semantically related distractor words (co-hyponyms to the target word) induce interference, which is usually taken as evidence for lexical competition. In an online picture-word-interference experiment, we showed that distractor words that share a feature with the target (here: their natural prototypical color), also induced interference. Pictures were not named with single words but with short descriptive sentences (“The heart is red”). Focus on the noun modulated the interference effect. In particular, when target and distractor were presented simultaneously, the interference effect was significantly reduced in the narrow focus condition, compared to broad focus. We discuss our findings for focus production against the findings on language comprehension reported in the literature, which mostly observed facilitatory effects of focus marking on the comprehension of focus alternatives. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Exploring the Role of Focus Alternatives in Language Production)
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18 pages, 1695 KiB  
Article
The Impact of Grammar on the Construal of Discourse Alternatives in German and English
by Christine Dimroth and Marianne Starren
Languages 2022, 7(3), 240; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7030240 - 15 Sep 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1803
Abstract
This paper investigates additive links to discourse alternatives in picture comparison dialogues produced by adult native speakers of English and German. Additive relations are established across turns when participants are confirming the presence of matching objects on both pictures (A: “I have X”. [...] Read more.
This paper investigates additive links to discourse alternatives in picture comparison dialogues produced by adult native speakers of English and German. Additive relations are established across turns when participants are confirming the presence of matching objects on both pictures (A: “I have X”. B: “I also have X”). Speakers thereby describe their own picture and construe the interlocutor (or rather: the interlocutor’s picture) as a discourse alternative. Whereas the vast majority of the confirming descriptions in German contain an additive particle (auch), less than half of the corresponding confirmations in the English data do (“also”, “too”, etc.). Numbers differ even more drastically in polarity questions (“Do you (also) have X?”) that are equally typical for the dialogue task. Such frequency differences are at odds with recent accounts treating additive particles as being quasi obligatory when their presupposition is satisfied. An in-depth contrastive analysis of lexical, syntactic and information structural properties reveals that the default mapping of information units on syntactic functions (subject) in conjunction with the SVO word order of English leads to a structure in which subject, initial (topic) position and the particle’s associated constituent coincide. This would make the relation to its discourse alternative more prominent than warranted by the dialogue task and speakers of English leave this relation unmarked or resort to alternative constructions instead. The V2 syntax of German, on the other hand, allows for a dissociation of discourse topic and associated constituent. It allows the speaker to topicalize reference to the matching object, to highlight the confirmation of its presence on the speaker’s picture, and to relate the changing information to its discourse alternative in a non-contrastive way. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Exploring the Role of Focus Alternatives in Language Production)
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19 pages, 962 KiB  
Article
Added Alternatives in Spoken Interaction: A Corpus Study on German Auch
by Laura Reimer and Christine Dimroth
Languages 2021, 6(4), 169; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6040169 - 15 Oct 2021
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1680
Abstract
Particles such as German auch (‘also’) establish an additive relation between expressions in their scope (added constituent, AC) and context alternatives against the background of shared information (common denominator). In spoken interaction, however, explicit alternatives are not necessarily present and expressions can be [...] Read more.
Particles such as German auch (‘also’) establish an additive relation between expressions in their scope (added constituent, AC) and context alternatives against the background of shared information (common denominator). In spoken interaction, however, explicit alternatives are not necessarily present and expressions can be construed as alternatives against different variants of a common denominator. It is the aim of the present paper to investigate to what extent the presence of alternatives influences the construction of utterances containing an additive particle. This is particularly relevant for German, where speakers can choose between an unstressed and stressed version of auch. We ask whether properties of the alternatives and their common denominators influence the choice to use stressed or unstressed auch. In a corpus study on spoken language, we classified the versions of auch, the particles AC, the alternatives in the preceding context and their common denominator. The results show that the speaker’s choice is influenced by the relation of the utterance to context alternatives. Specifically, the degree of explicitness of alternatives, the number of alternatives, and the degree of abstractness of the common denominator influence the continuation of the discourse, measured by the preference for one of the two variants of the particle auch. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Exploring the Role of Focus Alternatives in Language Production)
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