How “Just” Gets Its Meanings: Polysemy and Context in Psychological Semantics

Abstract

The adverb just is polysemous in having several related senses (e.g., It's just a cold; I just notice it at night; or I love cookies, just as you love cake). We present three studies looking at how readers determine the appropriate sense of just in context. The first study analyzed 871 naturalistic sentence contexts containing just, and revealed six senses for the adverb as well as some interesting patterns in which particular classes of words regularly followed particular senses of just. Study 2 experimentally tested the idea that a reader's choice of a sense of just can to a great degree be accounted for by knowing the word following just. Study 3 tested the hypothesis that entire sentence contexts assist people in narrowing down their choices of a sense of just. These findings suggest that people's choice of a sense of just is largely determined by the statistical co-occurrence of just with particular classes of words in one's life experience with language: in the case that co-occurrence information is insufficient to narrow one's decision, the larger context provides what is necessary to choose a sense of just. The implications for how people choose the sense of other types of words are addressed.