Information integration and domain restriction: Interpreting only in context

In this paper we report results of two eye-tracking experiments investigating on-line processing of the focus-sensitive expression ‘only’. The experiments described address two sets of questions having to do with the role of contextual information in restricting focus alternatives. First, there is the question of whether the preceding discourse context influences the referential domain with respect to which a sentence with ‘only’ is interpreted; specifically, does previous mention increase the likelihood of associating with ‘only’? This question is addressed by Experiment 1. Experiment 2 asks whether the relative informativity of the linguistic context influences what listeners expect to be in the alternative set. The remainder of this section reviews some properties of ‘only’ and its interpretation, then some of the relevant psycholinguistic findings using eye-tracking and the visual world paradigm. Experiment 1 is presented in Section 2, and Experiment 2 in Section 3. Section 4 concludes with a general discussion of the results, and suggests future research directions.