Alternatives: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives

This edited book brings together research investigating foundational issues relating to the generation and restriction of alternative sets from theoretical and empirical perspectives. It includes contributions from noted scholars in the field to provide theoretical arguments, opinionated perspectives synthesizing existing positions, and empirical evidence from experimentation and fieldwork in support of a theoretical framework. Alternatives have come to occupy a central place in formal semantic theory, and are referenced in notable accounts of various phenomena, including focus, negation, implicature, modality, counterfactuals, and contrastive topics, among others. More recently, experimental investigations have addressed the mental activation and availability of alternatives in sentence comprehension and memory representations, finding that alternative meanings are computed during incremental processing, and persist in memory after sentence completion for a limited amount of time. The diverse perspectives represented in this volume will serve to clarify and guide the major avenues available in future research on the topic, and the book will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in fields such as linguistics (especially psycholinguistics and experimental pragmatics), philosophy and cognitive science.

Richard Breheny is a Professor of Experimental Linguistics at University College London, UK and co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition. He has established one of the first labs in the area of Experimental Pragmatics and is widely recognized for his work on numerals and pragmatic inferences. He recently led a Leverhulme grant on alternatives.

Nicole Gotzner is a Full Professor at Osnabrück University, Germany and co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition. She is an expert in alternative semantics, the mental representation of alternatives and pragmatic inferences. She has published extensively on a wide range of topics relating to alternatives and received the most important early-career award by the DFG (German Research Foundation) for her work in this domain.

Jesse Harris is an Associate Professor at the Linguistics Department of UCLA, USA and an editor for the Semantics and Pragmatics section of Language and Linguistics Compass. He has taught graduate seminars on focus, prosody, and information structure, and has published widely on the processing of focus-sensitive structures and particles in English.

Yael Sharvit is a Professor at the Linguistics Department of UCLA, USA. Her research focuses on formal semantics and the syntax-semantics interface. She has worked on many topics, including local implicatures, NPIs or tense semantics.