How focus particles and accents affect attachment

What it is about

The question is whether information structure, not only prosodic boundaries, changes where an ambiguous modifier attaches. Sentences like "Susie heard that Bill had called on Monday" leave the final time phrase free to attach to the embedded verb or the matrix verb. Experiment 1a, a written questionnaire with 41 analysed participants, puts "only" before the first or the second verb: high attachment is 61.5% with "only" before Verb1 and 26.6% with "only" before Verb2 (beta 2.16, p < 0.001). A completion study shows that readers rarely take the verb after "only" as the narrow focus (99% of contrasts are with the first verb or its clause in one condition). Auditory experiments with 38 to 52 participants show the same direction, and contrastive L+H* accents have a smaller, additive effect (beta 0.39 and 0.54 in the two auditory studies, with no interaction with "only"). The authors revise the Focus Attraction Hypothesis: the modifier is drawn to the highest focused domain under "only", and perceivers do not need the verb to be accented.

Ideas

• I1. An attachment tie-break in en/src/parse.rs: when a final PP or time phrase is ambiguous between two verbs, and "only" precedes one of them, attach it to the VP headed by that verb. Measure the attachment accuracy on the paper's 20 items (Experiment 1a, the items with "(only)" in the appendix), with the default attachment as the baseline.
• I2. Keep the two cues as separate features in a perceptron attachment scorer (en/src/parse.rs, or the arc scorer of gparse): one feature for the position of "only", one for an accent on the verb. The paper reports the two as additive, so a model with no interaction term is the honest default; test whether a model with an interaction term gains anything on held-out items.
• I3. Use the paper's contradiction probe as a deterministic scope check in prag: a follow-up clause starting with "he" or "she" that contradicts the sentence shows which level "only" was applied to. Build the check on the paper's completion examples and count how often the contradicted constituent matches the rule's prediction.
• I4. Negative control: shuffle the position of "only" across the items, keep everything else fixed, and require the attachment accuracy to drop to baseline. A rule that does not depend on "only" must not gain on the shuffled set.

For Mova

The chapters are 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure (focus, "only" and information structure), 24. Coordination and subordination (attachment of adverbials and complement clauses), 33. Implicature and presupposition (exhaustivity of "only") and 23. Complementation (verbs that take a clause). The code is en/src/parse.rs for the attachment choice, gparse for the arc scorer, and prag/src/infer.rs for the scope of "only". The measure is attachment accuracy on the paper's items with the shuffled-position control, run twice to confirm it is identical.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.5782

@article{carlson2021how,
  title = {{How focus particles and accents affect attachment}},
  author = {Carlson, Katy and Potter, David},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.5782},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5782}
}

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