ATTENTIONAL FOCUSING WITH QUANTIFIERS IN PRODUCTION AND COMPREHENSION

There is a very large number of quantifiers in English, so many that i t seems impossible that the only information that they convey is about amounts. Building on the earlier work of Moxey and Sanford (1987), we report three experiments showing that positive and negative quantifie rs focus on different subsets of the logical possibilities that quanti fiers allow semantically Experiments 1 and 2 feature a continuation ta sk with quantifiers that span a full range of denotations (from near 0 % to near 100%) and show that the effect is not restricted to quantifi ers denoting small amounts. This enables a distinction to be made betw een generalization and complement set focus proper. The focus effects extend to comprehension, as shown by a self-paced reading study (Exper iment. 3). It is noted that the focus effects obtained are compatible with findings from earlier work by Just and Carpenter (1971), which us ed a verification paradigm, and in fact these effects constitute a dir ect test of inferences Just and Carpenter made about mechanisms of enc oding negative quantifiers. A related but different explanation is put forward to explain the present data. The experiments show a quantifie r function beyond the simple denotation of amount.