Supplementary materials for the article "Assessing scalar-additive meaning: a first exploratory study on some Italian focus operators"

This dataset contains the supplementary material for the article "Assessing scalar-additive meaning: a first exploratory study on some Italian focus operators". All content is documented in the README.md file. Abstract: This paper presents a novel empirical investigation of how Italian-speaking adults interpret a group of even-like scalar-additive focus operators, namely, persino–persino…non, pure–neppure and anche–neanche. Specifically, the study aimed at determining whether the meaning associated with these particles is roughly interchangeable or whether specific differences hold between them. Additionally, it sought to assess whether morphologically related positive-negative operators are interpreted in a complementary way in opposite contexts. 185 native speakers of Italian were tested via a Multiple-Choice Cloze Test whose results show that the meaning of persino–persino…non, pure–neppure and anche–neanche is not interchangeable. Like English, Italian seems to feature particles committed to a scalar-additive interpretation (persino–persino…non), and particles more closely, though not exclusively, linked to a merely additive reading (pure–neppure and anche–neanche). Results also indicate that morphologically related positive-negative operators are not necessarily interpreted as exact semantic counterparts in complementary contexts. We suggest that this asymmetry might be due to pragmatic factors such as the position of presupposition triggers and the frequency of competing alternatives, rather than to inherent semantic differences between the particles themselves.