Alternatives in Grammar and Cognition

This 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 occupy a central place in formal semantic theory, and are referenced in 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, 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, philosophy and cognitive science.

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

Jesse Harris is an Associate Professor at the Linguistics Department of University of California, Los Angeles, USA. He has published widely on the processing of focus-sensitive structures and other topics in experimental pragmatics. 

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.

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