Abstract 1. Introduction 2. Activation and Restriction of Alternatives 2.1. Activating Alternatives 2.2. Restriction of Alternatives 3. Exploitation of Alternatives by Foreground-sensitive Operators 3.1. Focus Semantics and Foreground-sensitive Operators 3.2. Exploitation of Alternatives by Lexically Explicit Operators: The Cases of always and only 3.3. Exploitation of Alternatives by Lexically Implicit Operators 4. Concluding Remarks and Residual Problems References