Abstract
Some negative quantifiers lead to pronominal reference patterns that are different from those obtained with positive quantifiers (Moxey & Sanford, 1993). This has been interpreted as meaning that the negatives give rise to a focus on the complement set (Moxey & Sanford, 1987); so, givenfew of the children enjoyed the trip, focus is on those who did not enjoy the trip. To date, this interpretation has depended on subjective judgments as to which set an anaphoric plural pronoun is referring to, allowing other interpretations of the data to be given by discourse semanticists. In two studies, we use the attachment patterns associated with the expressionincluding, thereby circumventing the judgment problem. We show that a case likenot many people enjoyed the race, including John leads to a representation in whichJohn maps into the set of individuals who did not enjoy the race. We test and support the earlier claim that complement set focus is driven by denials associated with some negative quantifiers.
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Sanford, A.J., Williams, C. & Fay, N. When being included is being excluded: A note on complement set focus and the inclusion relation. Memory & Cognition 29, 1096–1101 (2001). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03206378
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03206378