The function of focus is to activate alternatives, and these activated alternatives are used to compute the corresponding inferences of an utterance. The experimental research reported here investigates the role of focus intonation in inference computation and its interplay with the overt focus particles only and also. In particular, I compare the mechanisms underlying the computation of exhaustivity implicatures, assertions, and additive presuppositions. A memory delay experiment revealed that contrastive intonation (L+H*) makes an exhaustive interpretation equally available as overt only. A second experiment showed that in immediate processing, the implicature in bare focus conditions is delayed relative to the inferences associated with only and also. The findings thus indicate that L+H* accents do not conventionally encode an exhaustive meaning, but encourage implicature computation by (i) making relevant alternatives salient and (ii) providing a strong cue that an inference should be derived.

中文翻译：

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焦点语调在隐式计算中的作用：与和的比较

焦点的功能是激活替代项，这些激活的替代项用于计算话语的相应推论。实验研究报道在这里考察的重点语调的推理计算及其与显性焦点粒子相互作用的作用只有和也。特别是，我比较了穷举含义，断言和加法前提的计算基础。存储器延迟实验揭示对比语调（L + H +），使一个详尽的解释同样可作为公开只。第二个实验表明，在立即处理中，裸焦点条件下的隐含性相对于仅与和也。因此，这些发现表明，L + H *口音通常不会编码详尽的含义，而是通过（i）使相关的替代方式变得明显，以及（ii）提供强烈的推论来推导推断，从而促进了含蓄的计算。