Categorisation is arguably the most important organising principle in semantic memory. However, elements that are not in a categorical relation can be dynamically grouped together when the context provides a common theme for these elements. In the field of sentence (and discourse) comprehension, alternatives to a focused element can be thought of as a set of elements determined by a theme given in the utterance context. According to Alternative Semantics (Rooth, 1985, 1992), the main function of linguistic focus is to introduce a set of alternatives to the focused element within an utterance. Here, we will investigate the contribution of the utterance context to the composition of focus alternative sets. Specifically, we test whether a focus alternative set can contain elements that belong to different taxonomic categories (i.e., that are not closely semantically related). Using a behavioural probe recognition experiment, we show that participants activate elements from another taxonomic category than the focused element as part of sentence comprehension. This finding suggests that the composition of a focus alternative set is not simply based on semantic relations between the members of the set and the focused element, but that contextual relations also play a crucial role.

中文翻译：

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非分类关系在建立焦点替代集中的作用

分类可以说是语义记忆中最重要的组织原则。但是，当上下文为这些元素提供一个共同主题时，可以将不属于分类关系的元素动态地组合在一起。在句子（和话语）理解领域，焦点元素的替代方案可以被认为是由话语上下文中给定的主题确定的一组元素。根据替代语义学（Rooth，1985，1992），语言焦点的主要功能是在话语中引入一组替代焦点元素。在这里，我们将研究话语上下文对焦点替代集的构成的贡献。具体来说，我们测试一个焦点替代集是否可以包含属于不同分类类别的元素（即，语义上不密切相关的）。使用行为探测识别实验，我们表明参与者激活另一个分类类别的元素，而不是作为句子理解的一部分的重点元素。这一发现表明，焦点替代集的组成不仅基于集合成员与焦点元素之间的语义关系，而且上下文关系也起着至关重要的作用。