Effects of contrastive focus on lexical predictability during sentence reading: The case of constructions.

Previous research suggests that language comprehenders are sensitive to the presence of focus-sensitive particles-words like and that are effective at marking the focus of the sentence. In addition to signalling linguistic focus, these words can also establish a semantic contrast between the focused element and an alternate set. For example, the phrase places linguistic focus on and may also prompt comprehenders to anticipate a set of upcoming entities that stand in semantic contrast to .