Entailment, assertion, and textual coherence: the case of almost and barely * PATRI ´ CIA AMARAL Abstract This article contributes to the study of approximative adverbs almost and barely by providing psycholinguistic evidence for the asymmetry of their meaning components. The experiments reported are discussed against the background of a set of tests targeting the theoretical status of the meaning components. The first experiment addresses the role played by each mean- ing component in textual coherence, whereas the second experiment ad- dresses the interpretation in isolation of a sentence containing an approxi- mative adverb. The results argue for a pragmatic di¤erence in the role of the meaning components, along the lines of Horn’s (2002) proposal, per- taining to the way in which the implications of approximative adverbs con- tribute to context update. 1. Introduction It has long been noticed that the contribution of a lexical item to the meaning of a sentence (e.g., even, only, already) may yield more than one entailment (Lo ¨bner 1989; Kay 1990; Ko ¨nig 1991; Horn 2002; among others). This paper focuses on the relation between this phenomenon and textual coherence. In particular, this paper adopts an experimental approach to the behavior of the di¤erent entailments contributed by the meaning of a lexical item. The focus is on the meaning of English ‘‘ap- proximative adverbs’’ (henceforth AAs) almost and barely. The semantic and pragmatic properties of this pair of adverbs have been the subject of much debate in the literature, in particular pertaining to the theoretical status of each of their meaning components (Ducrot 1972; Anscombre and Ducrot 1983; Klein 1998; Sevi 1998; Horn 2002; Schwenter 2002). The current study contributes to this line of research by providing psycholinguistic evidence that the entailments of an AA are Linguistics 48–3 (2010), 525–545 DOI 10.1515/LING.2010.016 0024–3949/10/0048–0525 6 Walter de Gruyter