Carlson Katy, Dickey Michael Walsh, Frazier Lyn, Clifton Charles
Department of English, Foreign Languages and Philosophy, Morehead State University, Morehead, KY 40351, USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2009 Jan;62(1):114-39. doi: 10.1080/17470210701880171. Epub 2008 Apr 18.
In English, new information typically appears late in the sentence, as does primary accent. Because of this tendency, perceivers might expect the final constituent or constituents of a sentence to contain informational focus. This expectation should in turn affect how they comprehend focus-sensitive constructions such as ellipsis sentences. Results from four experiments on sluicing sentences (e.g., The mobster implicated the thug, but we can't find out who else) suggest that perceivers do prefer to place focus late in the sentence, though that preference can be mitigated by prosodic information (pitch accents, Experiment 2) or syntactic information (clefted sentences, Experiment 3) indicating that focus is located elsewhere. Furthermore, it is not necessarily the direct object, but the informationally focused constituent that is the preferred antecedent (Experiment 4). Expectations regarding the information structure of a sentence, which are only partly cancellable by means of overt focus markers, may explain persistent biases in ellipsis resolution.
在英语中，新信息通常出现在句子的后半部分，主重音也是如此。由于这种倾向，感知者可能会期望句子的最后一个或几个成分包含信息焦点。这种期望反过来又会影响他们对焦点敏感结构（如省略句）的理解。关于泄注句（例如，黑手党牵连了暴徒，但我们不知道还有谁）的四项实验结果表明，感知者确实倾向于将焦点置于句子后半部分，不过这种偏好可以通过韵律信息（音高重音，实验2）或句法信息（分裂句，实验3）来减轻，这些信息表明焦点位于其他地方。此外，首选的先行词不一定是直接宾语，而是信息焦点成分（实验4）。关于句子信息结构的期望，只有部分可以通过显性焦点标记来消除，这可能解释了省略消解中持续存在的偏差。
