A new perspective on referentiality in elicited narratives: Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue investigates the use of referential expressions in elicited picture-based narratives by children with and without developmental language disorders, across a range of languages and language combinations. All contributions use the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN, Gagarina et al. 2012, 2019). The studies featured in this issue cover monolingual and bilingual children aged 4–11 years, but focus mainly on age 4–7, a period in a child’s life where great strides are made in the development of narrative skills. This collection of papers offers a new perspective on referentiality for several reasons: all studies use the same stimuli and by and large the same procedure for the elicitation of narratives. The stimuli, four picture-based stories, are controlled for comparability of protagonists, plot and story structure. They were designed as a ‘visual’ representation of a multidimensional model of story grammar. This methodological and theoretical base allows for a comparative investigation of referentiality (including reference introduction, maintenance and reintroduction) in narratives, across languages and populations. This introduction addresses theoretical aspects of referentiality in decontextualised discourse and reviews the literature regarding the impact of language-specific referential systems and the age and path of acquisition in typically developing children and children with developmental language disorders. We also discuss methodological aspects of eliciting referentiality in narratives in detail. This introduction thus seeks explanations for the diverse and sometimes contradictory empirical results regarding children’s mastery of referentiality. Finally, an overview of the contributions in the special issue is given.

Referential expressions in monolingual and bilingual children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): A study of informativeness and definiteness

The current study evaluated the separate and combined effects of bilingualism and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on informativeness and definiteness marking of referential expressions. Hebrew-speaking monolingual children (21 with ASD and 28 with typical language development) and Russian–Hebrew-speaking bilingual children (13 with ASD and 30 with typical language development) aged 4–9 years participated. Informativeness, indexed by referential contrasts, was affected by ASD, but not by bilingualism. Definiteness use was non-target-like in children with ASD and in bilingual children, and it was mainly predicted by children’s morpho-syntactic abilities in Hebrew. Language-universal and language-specific properties of referential use are discussed.

Outline of a Linguistic Model for the Study of Emerging Naming

The article presents the outline of a linguistic model that is part of a methodology for identifying and analyzing emerging or referentially unstable namings, such as cultural appropriation, street harassment, climate refugee or ecocide. The model and the method are intended to guide the interpretation – manual or semi-automatic – of the referential expressions, according to the semantic-cognitive type of the designated entity (human entity, social process, event, etc.), but also taking into account interdiscursive negotiations that affect the choice of terms and their uses. The proposed approach is original and is based on several guiding ideas: (1) take into account the complexity of the naming and the entanglement of his different facets which are categorization, meaning, performativity and valuation (desirability, preferences, social norms), (2) target the development phase of the naming (observe how speakers deal with the unstable): for this purpose, we will use the notion of identification between weak or identified entities and strong or reference entities, (3) report in an integrated way the referential elaboration of knowledge, the lexical and semantic elaboration of expressions, and the expression of intersubjective attitudes. The scientific framework combines three main disciplinary areas: automatic language processing (construction and representation of knowledge, reference), semantics (elaboration of meanings) and discourse analysis (interdiscursive elaboration of concepts and terms).

Referential Chains Reveal Predictive Processes and Form-to-Function Mapping: An Electroencephalographic Study Using Naturalistic Story Stimuli

In discourse pragmatics, different referential forms are claimed to be indicative of the cognitive status of a referent in the current discourse. Referential expressions thereby possess a double function: They point back to an (existing) referent (form-to-function mapping), and they are used to derive predictions about a referent’s subsequent recurrence in discourse. Existing event-related potential (ERP) research has mainly focused on the form-to-function mapping of referential expression. In the present ERP study, we explore the relationship of form-to-function mapping and prediction derived from the antecedent of referential expressions in naturalistic auditory language comprehension. Specifically, the study investigates the relationship between the form of a referential expression (pronoun vs. noun) and the form of its antecedent (pronoun vs. noun); i.e., it examines the influence of the interplay of predictions derived from an antecedent (forward-looking function) and the form-to-function mapping of an anaphor (backward-looking function) on the ERPs time-locked to anaphoric expressions. The results in the time range of the P300 and N400 allow for a dissociation of these two functions during online language comprehension.

A corpus-based analysis of referentiality in Mapudungun

This report presents the methodological guidelines as well as some partial results of the study of referentiality in Mapudungun, a language isolate spoken in Chile and Argentina with different degrees of vitality. Reference in discourse encompasses two basic operations: the individuation of the referents and their anchorage in the discourse. Our research is part of a wider project which seeks to identify the structural resources used by the languages in referential operations. We investigate a set of structural and semantic parameters of referential expressions as they occur in a corpus of Mapudungun texts belonging to different genres. Some of the findings may represent general patterns of reference in natural texts, while others may be representative of specific Mapudungun genres. At a methodological level, our research shows that it is possible to substantiate hypotheses on reference and on discourse structure related to reference by hard figures, to characterize text genres by measurable semantic and structural properties, and to discover new phenomena which demand an explanation.

Discourse-referential patterns as a network of grammatical constructions

Grammatical organization of conversational language presents us with the challenge of incorporating recurrent contextual and discourse-relevant properties in grammatical descriptions, as part of speakers’ conventional knowledge. Using data from conversational Czech extracted from the Czech National Corpus, I address this issue by tracing the relationships among a set of dative-marked expressions of interpersonal relations (traditionally labeled ‘ethical datives’) and their connection to argument-expressing dative NPs. The discourse-referential expressions form a family of distinct patterns, the differences having to do with person (1st, 2nd) and number (sg. vs. pl.); functionally, they range from marking subjectively assessed newsworthiness to signaling evidentiality and solidarity to expressing the speaker’s emotional state. The attendant reorganization of formal, semantic, and discourse features that define these dative-marked items amounts to several patterns – ‘interactional datives’ – and I show that they have the status of grammatical constructions, which are conventionally tied to certain types of discourse settings and speaker-hearer expectations. In order to represent these constructions and their relationship to other, partially related, patterns, I propose a network representation in the form of contiguous functional spaces that overlap at the boundary between argument-expression and interactional markers.

ASL Production

Previous research has pointed at naturalness and communicative efficiency as possible constraints on language structure. Here, we investigated adjective position in American Sign Language (ASL), a language with relatively flexible word order, to test the incremental efficiency hypothesis, according to which both speakers and signers try to produce efficient referential expressions that are sensitive to the word order of their languages. The results of three experiments using a standard referential communication task confirmed that deaf ASL signers tend to produce absolute adjectives, such as color or material, in prenominal position, while scalar adjectives tend to be produced in prenominal position when expressed as lexical signs, but in postnominal position when expressed as classifiers. Age of ASL exposure also had an effect on referential choice, with early-exposed signers producing more classifiers than late-exposed signers. Overall, our results suggest that linguistic, pragmatic and developmental factors affect referential choice in ASL, supporting the hypothesis that communicative efficiency is an important factor in shaping language structure.

Switch-reference and its role in referential choice in Mbyá Guaraní narratives

Switch-reference has been analyzed as a reference tracking mechanism, whose main function is to avoid ambiguity of reference. One domain where this function has been argued to manifest itself is referential choice. Kibrik (Kibrik, Andrej. 2011. Reference in discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press) notably proposed that switch-reference marking plays the role of a referential aid, which helps to prevent referential conflict, thereby enabling the production of reduced referential expressions such as pronouns and zeros. The present study probes this theory through an analysis of the role of switch-reference marking in multifactorial models of referential choice in Mbyá Guaraní. We show that while switch-reference increases the likelihood of mention reduction in Mbyá Guaraní, this effect is marginal relative to other predictors of referential choice. We argue that this result is compatible with the analysis of switch-reference as a referential aid, but also supports analyses that emphasize the multiplicity of its functions, beyond the disambiguation of reference.

Decoding the silence: Neural bases of zero pronoun resolution in Chinese

Chinese is one of many languages that can drop subjects. We report an fMRI study of language comprehension processes in these "zero pronoun" cases. The fMRI data come from Chinese speakers who listened to an audiobook. We conducted both univariate GLM and multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) on these data time-locked to each verb with a zero pronoun subject. We found increased left middle temporal gyrus activity for zero pronouns compared to overt subjects, suggesting additional effort searching for an antecedent during zero pronoun resolution. MVPA further revealed that the intended referent of a zero pronoun seems to be physically represented in the Precuneus and the Parahippocampal Gyrus shortly after its presentation. This highlights the role of memory and discourse-level processing in resolving referential expressions, including unspoken ones, in naturalistic language comprehension.