The notion of kontrast, or the ability of certain linguistic expressions to generate a set of alternatives, originally proposed by Vallduví and Vilkuna (1998) as a clause-level concept, is re-analyzed here as connecting the level of information packaging in the clause and the level of discourse structure in the following way: kontrast is encoded at the clausal level but has repercussions for discourse structure. This claim is supported by evidence from the distribution properties of three colloquial Russian particles -to, e, (...) andved' which are analyzed as unambiguous markers of kontrast. Both the placement of these particles at the clausal level and their role in discourse are viewed as consequences of the type of the kontrast set and the cognitive status of information marked by each particle. (shrink)

We present a method for improving local coherence in German with a positive effect on automatically as well as human-generated texts. We demonstrate that local coherence crucially depends on which constituent occupies the initial position in a sentence. To support our hypothesis, we provide statistical evidence based on a corpus investigation and on results of an experiment with human judges. Additionally, we implement our findings in a generation module for determining the Vorfeld constituent automatically.

Recent years have seen a surge in accounts motivated by information theory that consider language production to be partially driven by a preference for communicative efficiency. Evidence from discourse production (i.e., production beyond the sentence level) has been argued to suggest that speakers distribute information across discourse so as to hold the conditional per-word entropy associated with each word constant, which would facilitate efficient information transfer (Genzel & Charniak, 2002). This hypothesis implies that the conditional (contextualized) probabilities of linguistic units (...) affect speakers’ preferences during production. Here, we extend this work in two ways. First, we explore how preceding cues are integrated into contextualized probabilities, a question which so far has received little to no attention. Specifically, we investigate how a cue's maximal informativity about upcoming words (the cue's effectiveness) decays as a function of the cue's recency. Based on properties of linguistic discourses as well as properties of human memory, we analytically derive a model of cue effectiveness decay and evaluate it against cross-linguistic data from 12 languages. Second, we relate the information theoretic accounts of discourse production to well-established mechanistic (activation-based) accounts: We relate contextualized probability distributions over words to their relative activation in a lexical network given preceding discourse. (shrink)

This paper examines the role that linguistic and cognitive prominence play in the resolution of anaphor–antecedent relationships. In two experiments, we found that pronouns are immediately sensitive to the cognitive prominence of potential antecedents when other antecedent selection cues are uninformative. In experiment 1, results suggest that despite their theoretical dissimilarities, topic and contrastive focus both serve to enhance cognitive prominence. Results from experiment 2 suggest that the contrastive prosody appropriate for focus constructions may also play an important role in (...) enhancing cognitive prominence. Thus different types of linguistic prominence (topic, contrastive focus) appear to have the common effect of increasing the cognitive prominence of the discourse referent. For pronouns with two possible antecedents, the cognitive prominence of an antecedent aids in anaphor resolution, immediately biasing selection towards the more prominent (and ultimately preferred) antecedent. (shrink)

When faced with an ambiguous pronoun, an addressee must interpret it by identifying a suitable referent. It has been proposed that the interpretation of pronouns can be captured using Bayes’ Rule: P ∝ PP. This approach has been successful in English and Mandarin Chinese. In this study, we further the cross-linguistic evidence for the Bayesian model by applying it to German personal and demonstrative pronouns, and provide novel quantitative support for the model by assessing model performance in a Bayesian statistical (...) framework that allows implementation of a fully hierarchical structure, providing the most conservative estimates of uncertainty. Data from two story-continuation experiments showed that the Bayesian model overall made more accurate predictions for pronoun interpretation than production and next-mention biases separately. Furthermore, the model accounts for the demonstrative pronoun dieser as well as the personal pronoun, despite the demonstrative having different, and more rigid, resolution preferences. (shrink)

The empirical study of language is a young field in contemporary linguistics. This being the case, and following a natural development process, the field is currently at a stage where different research methods and experimental approaches are being put into question in terms of their validity. Without pretending to provide an answer with respect to the best way to conduct linguistics related experimental research, in this article we aim at examining the process that researchers follow in the design and implementation (...) of experimental linguistics research with a goal to validate specific theoretical linguistic analyses. First, we discuss the general challenges that experimental work faces in finding a compromise between addressing theoretically relevant questions and being able to implement these questions in a specific controlled experimental paradigm. We discuss the Granularity Mismatch Problem (Poeppel and Embick, 2005 ) which addresses the challenges that research that is trying to bridge the representations and computations of language and their psycholinguistic/neurolinguistic evidence faces, and the basic assumptions that interdisciplinary research needs to consider due to the different conceptual granularity of the objects under study. To illustrate the practical implications of the points addressed, we compare two approaches to perform linguistic experimental research by reviewing a number of our own studies strongly grounded on theoretically informed questions. First, we show how linguistic phenomena similar at a conceptual level can be tested within the same language using measurement of event-related potentials (ERP) by discussing results from two ERP experiments on the processing of long-distance backward dependencies that involve coreference and negative polarity items respectively in Dutch. Second, we examine how the same linguistic phenomenon can be tested in different languages using reading time measures by discussing the outcome of four self-paced reading experiments on the processing of in-situ wh -questions in Mandarin Chinese and French. Finally, we review the implications that our findings have for the specific theoretical linguistics questions that we originally aimed to address. We conclude with an overview of the general insights that can be gained from the role of structural hierarchy and grammatical constraints in processing and the existing limitations on the generalization of results. (shrink)

RESUMO Este artigo tem como objetivo ilustrar a contribuição do dialogismo para o campo de aquisição da linguagem. De acordo com as abordagens dialógicas, as crianças não experienciam unidades e estruturas linguísticas per se; elas experienciam a linguagem em contextos significativos. Mais especificamente, gêneros do discurso, atividades e situações de interação aparecem como mediadores entre o discurso individual, os usos sociais e uma linguagem particular. Para ilustrar as implicações de uma abordagem dialógica, este artigo apresenta uma pesquisa sobre a aquisição (...) de expressões referenciais (projeto DIAREF). As expressões referenciais são particularmente relevantes, já que seu domínio envolve tanto aspectos formais quanto funcionais da língua. Os resultados mostram que os usos de substantivos, pronomes pessoais, pronomes demonstrativos e deslocamentos realizados pelas crianças são determinados em conjunto com os fatores pragmático-discursivos, tais como a posição nos encadeamentos referenciais, e fatores sócio discursivos, tais como gêneros do discurso, atividades e situações interacionais. (shrink)

Most philosophers recognize that applying the standard semantics for complex demonstratives to non-deictic instances results in truth conditions that are anomalous, at best. This fact has generated little concern, however, since most philosophers treat non-deictic demonstratives as marginal cases, and believe that they should be analyzed using a distinct semantic mechanism. In this paper, I argue that non-deictic demonstratives cannot be written off; they are widespread in English and foreign languages, and must be treated using the same semantic machinery that (...) is applied to deictic instances. (shrink)

I distinguish between the classical Gricean approach to conversational implicatures, which I call the action-theoretic approach, and the approach to CIs taken in contemporary cognitive science. Once we free ourselves from the AT account, and see implicating as a form of what I call “conversational tailoring”, we can more easily see the many different ways that CIs arise in conversation. I will show that they arise not only on the basis of a speaker’s utterance of complete sentences but also on (...) the basis of sub-sentential clauses—cases of so-called embedded implicatures—as well as from discourse segments containing several sentences—cases that Geurts calls ‘multiplicatures’. I will argue that they arise also from contents that are themselves implicit, such as presupposed contents or other implicatures. All but the first sort of case are difficult for the traditional Gricean AT account to handle, whereas they fall naturally out of an account that sees conversational participants as engaged in conversational tailoring—i.e., as engaged in a process of shaping informational and discourse structural properties of utterances in their successive conversational turns, and hence shaping their interlocutors’ cognitive environments. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether the model of local rhetorical coherence suggested in Knott et al. (2001) can boost the performance of the Centering-based metrics of entity coherence employed by Karamanis et al. (2004) for the task of information ordering. Rhetorical coherence is integrated into the way Centering’s basic data structures are derived from the annotated features of the GNOME corpus. The results indicate that (a) the simplest metric continues to perform better than its competitors even when local rhetorical coherence is (...) taken into account, and (b) this extra coherence constraint decreases its performance. (shrink)

We conducted two eye-tracking experiments investigating the processing of the Mandarin reflexive ziji in order to tease apart structurally constrained accounts from standard cue-based accounts of memory retrieval. In both experiments, we tested whether structurally inaccessible distractors that fulfill the animacy requirement of ziji influence processing times at the reflexive. In Experiment 1, we manipulated animacy of the antecedent and a structurally inaccessible distractor intervening between the antecedent and the reflexive. In conditions where the accessible antecedent mismatched the animacy cue, (...) we found inhibitory interference whereas in antecedent-match conditions, no effect of the distractor was observed. In Experiment 2, we tested only antecedent-match configurations and manipulated locality of the reflexive-antecedent binding (Mandarin allows non-local binding). Participants were asked to hold three distractors (animate vs. inanimate nouns) in memory while reading the target sentence. We found slower reading times when animate distractors were held in memory (inhibitory interference). Moreover, we replicated the locality effect reported in previous studies. These results are incompatible with structure-based accounts. However, the cue-based ACT-R model of Lewis and Vasishth ( 2005 ) cannot explain the observed pattern either. We therefore extend the original ACT-R model and show how this model not only explains the data presented in this article, but is also able to account for previously unexplained patterns in the literature on reflexive processing. (shrink)

Clarence Sloat, Ora Matushansky, and Delia Graff Fara advocate a Syntactic Rationale on behalf of predicativism, the view that names are predicates in all of their occurrences. Each argues that a set of surprising syntactic data compels us to recognize names as a special variety of count noun. This data set, they say, reveals that names’ interaction with the determiner system differs from that of common count nouns only with respect to the definite article ‘the’. They conclude that this special (...) distribution of names is best explained by the-predicativism, the view that posits the existence of the null-determiner ‘the’ preceding bare singular names. This essay argues that they have incorrectly discerned the syntactic facts: their critical data point concerning the ungrammaticality of sentences like “The Katherine wants coffee” is mistaken. Such sentences’ grammaticality undermines the Syntactic Rationale and presents serious auxiliary problems for predicativism. (shrink)

Overview The debate over the semantics of proper names has, of late, heated up, focusing on the relative merits of referentialism and predicativism. Referentialists maintain that the semantic function of proper names is to designate individuals. They hold that a proper name, as it occurs in a sentence in a context of use, refers to a specific individual that is its referent and has just that individual as its semantic content, its contribution to the proposition expressed by the sentence. Furthermore, (...) a proper name contributes its referent to the proposition expressed by virtue of mechanisms of direct reference to individuals, not by virtue of expressing properties. Predicativists embrace an opposing view according to which proper names are just a special kind of common noun. Their semantic function is to designate properties of individuals. A proper name, as it occurs in a sentence in a context of use, expresses a property, and that property is its contribution to the proposition expr .. (shrink)

Evidence suggests that English speakers use pronouns when referring to the grammatical subject and predictable thematic role. We tested how grammatical role and thematic role predictability affect different types of referential forms, namely, overt pronouns and null pronouns in Mandarin Chinese. We found that both overt and null pronouns were sensitive to grammatical role. However, we did not find any evidence that overt and null pronouns were sensitive to thematic role predictability. Although null pronouns were influenced by grammatical role, the (...) rate of null pronouns for subject reference was very low compared to that of overt pronouns. Given the frequent occurrence of null pronouns in Mandarin, our results suggest that the use of null pronouns may not be explained by a simple grammatical role mechanism. (shrink)

Sensitivity to the extra-linguistic context, as exhibited by indexical and demonstrative expressions, and sensitivity to the linguistic context, as exhibited by, for example, anaphoric uses of third person pronouns, are regularly regarded as different and independent phenomena. The data on indexicals, demonstratives, and third person pronouns, however, call for a more unified notion of context and of context sensitivity. This paper aims to develop such a unified picture by generalizing the notion of anaphora to encompass extra-linguistic context dependency and generalizing (...) the notion of a structured discourse context so that contexts contain antecedents for expressions that refer to entities in the extra-linguistic context. (shrink)

In this paper we consider the potential role of metarepresentation—the representation of another representation, or as commonly considered within cognitive science, the mental representation of another individual's knowledge and beliefs—in mediating definite reference and common ground in conversation. Using dialogues from a referential communication study in which speakers conversed in succession with two different addressees, we highlight ways in which interlocutors work together to successfully refer to objects, and achieve shared conceptualizations. We briefly review accounts of how such shared conceptualizations (...) could be represented in memory, from simple associations between label and referent, to “triple co-presence” representations that track interlocutors in an episode of referring, to more elaborate metarepresentations that invoke theory of mind, mutual knowledge, or a model of a conversational partner. We consider how some forms of metarepresentation, once created and activated, could account for definite reference in conversation by appealing to ordinary processes in memory. We conclude that any representations that capture information about others' perspectives are likely to be relatively simple and subject to the same kinds of constraints on attention and memory that influence other kinds of cognitive representations. (shrink)

We report the results of one visual‐world eye‐tracking experiment and two referent selection tasks in which we investigated the effects of information structure in the form of prosody and word order manipulation on the processing of subject pronouns er and der in German. Factors such as subjecthood, focus, and topicality, as well as order of mention have been linked to an increased probability of certain referents being selected as the pronoun's antecedent and described as increasing this referent's prominence, salience, or (...) accessibility. The goal of this study was to find out whether pronoun processing is primarily guided by linguistic factors (e.g., grammatical role) or nonlinguistic factors (e.g., first‐mention), and whether pronoun interpretation can be described in terms of referents' “prominence” / “accessibility” / “salience.” The results showed an overall subject preference for er, whereas der was affected by the object role and focus marking. While focus increases the attentional load and enhances memory representation for the focused referent making the focused referent more available, ultimately it did not affect the final interpretation of er, suggesting that “prominence” or the related concepts do not explain referent selection preferences. Overall, the results suggest a primacy of linguistic factors in determining pronoun resolution. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to investigate whether choosing the appropriate referring expression requires taking into account the hearer’s perspective, as is predicted under some versions of bidirectional Optimality Theory but is unexpected under other versions. We did this by comparing the results of 25 young and 25 elderly adults on an elicitation task based on eight different picture stories, and a comprehension task based on eight similar written stories. With respect to the elicitation task, we found that elderly (...) adults produce pronouns significantly more often than young adults when referring to the old topic in the presence of a new topic. With respect to the comprehension task, no significant differences were found between elderly and young adults. These results support the hypothesis that speakers optimize bidirectionally and take into account hearers when selecting a referring expression. If the use of a pronoun will lead to an unintended interpretation by the hearer, the speaker will use an unambiguous definite noun phrase instead. Because elderly adults are more limited in their processing capacities, as is indicated by their smaller working memory capacity, as speakers they will not always be able to reason about the hearer’s choices. As a result, they frequently produce non-recoverable pronouns. (shrink)

In cue-based content-addressable approaches to memory, a target and its competitors are retrieved in parallel from memory via a fast, associative cue-matching procedure under a severely limited focus of attention. Such a parallel matching procedure could in principle ignore the serial order or hierarchical structure characteristic of linguistic relations. I present an eye tracking while reading experiment that investigates whether the sentential position of a potential antecedent modulates the strength of similarity-based interference, a well-studied effect in which increased similarity in (...) features between a target and its competitors results in slower and less accurate retrieval overall. The manipulation trades on an independently established Locality bias in sluiced structures to associate a wh -remnant ( which ones ) in clausal ellipsis with the most local correlate ( some wines ), as in The tourists enjoyed some wines, but I don't know which ones. The findings generally support cue-based parsing models of sentence processing that are subject to similarity-based interference in retrieval, and provide additional support to the growing body of evidence that retrieval is sensitive to both the structural position of a target antecedent and its competitors, and the specificity or diagnosticity of retrieval cues. (shrink)

A number of studies in the extant literature report findings that suggest asymmetry in the way reflexive and pronoun anaphors are interpreted in the early stages of processing: that pronouns are less sensitive to structural constraints, as formulated by Binding Theory, than reflexives, in the initial antecedent retrieval process. However, in previous visual world paradigm eye-tracking studies, these conclusions were based on sentences that placed the critical anaphors within picture noun phrases or prepositional phrases, which have independently been shown not (...) to neatly conform to the Binding Theory principles. We present results from a visual world paradigm eye-tracking experiment that show that when critical anaphors are placed in the indirect object position immediately following a verb as a recipient argument, pronoun and reflexive processing are equally sensitive to structural constraints. (shrink)

Two issues relevant to discourse description and analysis are discussed, namely which property of the sentence structure reflects its discourse anchoring, and how to combine the ‘dynamic’ view of language and discourse with the description of sentence syntax. To this aim, our approach to the information structure of the sentence is briefly summarized, introducing then the notion of the hierarchy of activation of the elements of the stock of knowledge assumed by the speaker to be shared by him and the (...) hearer and proposing some heuristics guiding the development of the activation degrees. These heuristics are applied to a piece of text discussing certain implications of the proposed analysis and some related problems, and briefly sketching a possibility of how to test the proposed approach to text analysis on a large annotated corpus of texts. (shrink)

Within the Givenness Hierarchy framework of Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski (1993), lexical items included in referring forms are assumed to conventionally encode two kinds of information: conceptual information about the speaker’s intended referent and procedural information about the assumed cognitive status of that referent in the mind of the addressee, the latter encoded by various determiners and pronouns. This article focuses on effects of underspecification of cognitive status, establishing that, although salience and accessibility play an important role in reference processing, (...) the Givenness Hierarchy itself is not a hierarchy of degrees of salience/accessibility, contrary to what has often been assumed. We thus show that the framework is able to account for a number of experimental results in the literature without making additional assumptions about form-specific constraints associated with different referring forms. (shrink)

This paper investigates reference to clausally introduced entities and proposes an explanation for why these are more readily available to immediate subsequent reference with a demonstrative pronoun than with the personal pronoun,it. New evidence is provided supporting proposals that such entities are typically activated, but not brought into focus, upon their introduction into a discourse. The study also provides further insight into the role of information structure, lexical semantics, presuppositional contexts, and syntactic structure in bringing an entity into focus of (...) attention. (shrink)

This paper is about how to interpret and evaluate purported evidence for predicativism about proper names. I aim to point out some underappreciated thorny issues and to offer both predicativists and non-predicativists some advice about how best to pursue their respective projects. I hope to establish three related claims: that non-predicativists have to posit relatively exotic, though not entirely implausible, polysemic mechanisms to capture the range of data that predicativists have introduced ; that neither referentialism nor extant versions of predicativism (...) can offer a very plausible account of the interpretive possibilities for singular unmodified definite descriptions containing names ; and that the most plausible version of predicativism would treat bare names as non-anaphoric definite descriptions. (shrink)

This study examines the event- related brain potential (ERP) of 25 Mexican monolingual Spanish-speakers when reading Spanish sentences with single entity anaphora or complex anaphora. Complex anaphora is an expression that refer to propositions, states, facts or events while, a single entity anaphora is an expression that refers back to a concrete object. Here we compare the cognitive cost in processing a single entity anaphora [éstafeminine; La renuncia (resignation)] from a complex anaphora [estoneuter; La renuncia fue aceptada (The resignation was (...) accepted)].Éstaelicited a larger positive peak at 200 ms, andestoelicited a larger frontal negativity around 400 ms. The positivity resembles the P200 component, and its amplitude is thought to represent an interaction between predictive qualities in sentence processing (i.e., graphical similarity and frequency of occurrence). Unlike parietal negativities (typical N400), frontal negativities are thought to represent the ease by which pronouns are linked with its antecedent, and how easy the information is recovered from short-term memory. Thus, the complex anaphora recruited more cognitive resources than the single entity anaphora. We also included an ungrammatical control sentence [éstemasculine; La renuncia (resignation)] to better understand the unique processes behind complex anaphoric resolution, as opposed to just general difficulty in sentence processing. In this case, event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited byéstemasculineandéstafemininewere compared. Again,éstaelicited a larger P200. However, different from the experimental condition, a left anterior negativity (LAN) effect was observed foréste; the ungrammatical condition. Altogether, the present research provides electrophysiological evidence indicating that demonstrative pronouns with different morphosyntactic features (i.e., gender) and discourse parameters (i.e., single entity or complex referent) interact during the first stage of anaphoric processing of anaphora. This stage initiated as early as 200 milliseconds after the pronoun onset and probably ends around 400 ms. (shrink)

We report two experiments that investigated the widely held assumption that speakers use the addressee’s discourse model when choosing referring expressions (e.g., Ariel, 1990; Chafe, 1994; Givón, 1983; Prince, 1985), by manipulating whether the addressee could hear the immediately preceding linguistic context. Experiment 1 showed that speakers increased pronoun use (and decreased noun phrase use) when the referent was mentioned in the immediately preceding sentence compared to when it was not, even though the addressee did not hear the preceding sentence, (...) indicating that speakers used their own, privileged discourse model when choosing referring expressions. The same pattern of results was found in Experiment 2. Speakers produced more pronouns when the immediately preceding sentence mentioned the referent than when it mentioned a referential competitor, regardless of whether the sentence was shared with their addressee. Thus, we conclude that choice of referring expression is determined by the referent’s accessibility in the speaker’s own discourse model rather than the addressee’s. (shrink)

Evidence suggests that speakers can take account of the addressee's needs when referring. However, what representations drive the speaker's audience design has been less clear. This study aims to go beyond previous studies by investigating the interplay between the visual and linguistic context during audience design. Speakers repeated subordinate descriptions given in the prior linguistic context less and used basic-level descriptions more when the addressee did not hear the linguistic context than when s/he did. But crucially, this effect happened only (...) when the referent lacked the visual attributes associated with the expressions, so there was no other contextual cue available for the identification of the referent. This suggests that speakers flexibly use different contextual cues to help their addressee map the referring expression onto the intended referent. In addition, speakers used fewer pronouns when the addressee did not hear the linguistic antecedent than when s/he did. This suggests that although speakers may be egocentric during anaphoric reference, they can cooperatively avoid pronouns when the linguistic antecedents were not shared with their addressee during initial reference. (shrink)

Results from two self-paced reading experiments in English are reported in which subject- and object-extracted relative clauses (SRCs and ORCs, respectively) were presented in contexts that support both types of relative clauses (RCs). Object-extracted versions were read more slowly than subject-extracted versions across both experiments. These results are not consistent with a decay-based working memory account of dependency formation where the amount of decay is a function of the number of new discourse referents that intervene between the dependents (Gibson, 1998; (...) Warren & Gibson, 2002). Rather, these results support interference-based accounts and decay-based accounts where the amount of decay depends on the number of words or on the type of noun phrases that intervene between the dependents. In Experiment 2, presentation in supportive contexts was directly contrasted with presentation in null contexts. Whereas in the null context the extraction effect was only observed during the RC region, in a supportive context the extraction effect was numerically larger and persisted into the following region, thus showing that extraction effects are enhanced in supportive contexts. A sentence completion study demonstrated that the rate of SRCs versus ORCs was similar across null and supportive contexts (with most completions being subject-extractions), ruling out the possibility that an enhanced extraction effect in supportive contexts is due to ORCs being less expected in such contexts. However, the content of the RCs differed between contexts in the completions, such that the RCs produced in supportive contexts were more constrained, reflecting the lexical and semantic content of the preceding context. This effect, which we discuss in terms of expectations/lexico-syntactic priming, suggests that the enhancement of the extraction effect in supportive contexts is due to the facilitation of the subject-extracted condition. (shrink)

This paper offers a review of research on demonstratives from an interdisciplinary perspective. In particular, we consider the role of demonstratives in current research on language universals, language evolution, language acquisition, multimodal communication, signed language, language and perception, language in interaction, spatial imagery, and discourse processing. Traditionally, demonstratives are analyzed as a particular class of spatial deictics. Yet, a number of recent studies have argued that space is largely irrelevant to deixis and that demonstratives are primarily used for social and (...) interactive purposes. Synthesizing findings in the literature, we conclude that demonstratives are a very special class of linguistic items that are foundational to both spatial and social aspects of language and cognition. (shrink)