Dr Christina Kim, Lecturer in Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Linguistics, has published a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics (Oxford University Press, 2019).
The book is the first to explore the growing field of experimental semantics and pragmatics. In the past twenty years, experimental data has become a major source of evidence for building theories of language meaning and use, encompassing a wide range of topics and methods, and offering an up-to-date account of research in the field including scalar implicatures, presuppositions, counterfactuals, quantification, metaphor, prosody, and politeness, as well as exploring how and why a particular experimental method is suitable for addressing a given theoretical debate.
Christina’s chapter provides an overview of experimental investigations on focus, how focus is cued and interpreted, and how the perception of focus affects other aspects of sentence or discourse comprehension. Since early studies on focus, attention and memory, experimental findings related to focus have gone hand in hand with developments in theoretical semantics and pragmatics. She covers some main strands of this body of experimental work, including the influence of focus on syntactic ambiguity resolution, focus as a cue to discourse structure, focus and pronoun resolution, the role of focus in referential disambiguation, the inference of focus alternatives, and cues to focus projection.