Complement focus and reference phenomena

This chapter presents the results of various experiments that investigated how different determiners and quantifiers make different sets of entities available for reference. It also reviews numerous accounts of a phenomenon known as complement set reference (compset reference) and shows that it is part of a cluster of phenomena related to negative and positive quantifiers. It then considers various attempts to explore the phenomenon in the context of discourse semantics and presents a number of psychological experiments linking the phenomenon to aspects of negativity and denial of a supposition. It shows that negative quantifiers such as few appear to allow reference to a complement set, contrary to Discourse Representation Theory