Activation of Alternatives by Mandarin Sentence-Initial and Sentence-Internal Foci: A Semantic Priming Study

Tsun-Ming Ma, Yu-Yin Hsu, Tianyi Han, Daria Tack

Abstract: This paper reports results of a semantic priming study on the activation of semantic alternatives by focus phrases in Mandarin introduced by focus-operators – zhiyou ‘only’ and lian ‘even’ – located in two sentence positions (initial and internal). In this study, we used a lexical semantic priming paradigm to study how native mature readers of Mandarin Chinese response to three types of semantic associations (alternative, non-contrastive, and unrelated) through ratings of 7-point Likert Scales. According to Rooth’s Alternative Semantics, focus units activate a set of alternative units semantically. Our results show that the activation of semantic alternatives was indeed sustainably more prominent for words occurring in focus constructions than when they occurred in canonical, non-focus, sentences. However, neither the focus type nor the focus position had specific effects on the activation of alternatives.