How speakers alert addressees to multiple meanings

Two experiments and a corpus-based study test the hypothesis, falling out of the Graded Salience Hypothesis (Giora, 1997 and Giora, 2003), that addressees’ attention to meanings low on salience may be drawn by explicit marking (the low-salience marking hypothesis). In the experiments, participants were presented context-less sentences, followed by a 7-point scale. They were asked to rate the proximity of the interpretation of the sentences to those instantiated at the scale's ends. Items were identical except for the inclusion or exclusion of a marker. Results show that ratings of items including a marker received lower scores compared to items not including a marker, thus confirming that the markers prompted low-salience meanings.The corpus-based study looked at naturally occurring examples in which concepts appeared with a specific marker (double entendre, in Hebrew). It tested the 2-fold prediction that (a) the tested marker does not draw attention to meanings equally salient and (b) that when appearing within context the environment of concepts marked by this marker will resonate with their low-salience meaning. Results show that in the absence of the marker, concepts have a preferred (salient) meaning and that the environments of these concepts, when marked, resonate with their low-salience meanings, indicating that, within context, the marker drew attention to these low-salience meanings.