The influence of focus operators on syntactic processing of short relativeclause sentences

Ni, Crain, and Shankweiler (1996) present evidence to suggest that the focu s operator only, can guide how reduced relative clause sentences are initia lly parsed. In this paper, we demonstrate that this does not hold for relat ive clause sentences that start with a noun-phrase, verb, noun-phrase const ruction. We report an eye movement study in which subjects read reduced and unreduced sentences of this type with and without the focus operator only There mere longer first-pass reading times in the critical region of reduce d sentences than in the same region of unreduced sentences, regardless of t he inclusion of only. Furthermore, readers spent less time re-inspecting po rtions of text after being garden pathed when reading reduced relative clau se sentences that contained the focus operator than when reading reduced re lative clause sentences that did not. We conclude that subjects initially s yntactically misanalysed reduced relative clause sentences with and without only, and the inclusion of a focus operator facilitated recovery procedure s rather than guiding initial parsing. These results are inconsistent with the referential theory and undermine the conclusions of Ni et al. (1996).