Coherence relations across speech and sign language

This paper provides the first contrastive analysis of a coherence relation (viz. addition) and its connectives across a sign language (French Belgian Sign Language) and a spoken language (French), both used in the same geographical area. The analysis examines the frequency and types of connectives that can express an additive relation, in order to contrast its “markedness” in the two languages, that is, whether addition is marked by dedicated connectives or by ambiguous, polyfunctional ones. Furthermore, we investigate the functions of the most frequent additive connective in each language (namely et and the sign SAME), starting from the observation that most connectives are highly polyfunctional. This analysis intends to show which functions are compatible with the meaning of addition in spoken and signed discourse. Despite a common core of shared discourse functions, the equivalence between et and SAME is only partial and relates to a difference in their semantics.

Effects of discourse factors on the interpretation of Korean null pronouns in subject and object position

The present study investigates whether interpretation of null pronouns in Korean is best captured by a heuristics-based approach, focusing on subjecthood and syntactic parallelism, or a discourse-based coherence-relation approach, which regards pronoun resolution as a side-effect of general inferencing processes during discourse comprehension. We report two experiments where we investigated whether and how the interpretation of null pronouns in subject and object position in Korean is influenced by (i) the nature of the connective between the preceding clause and the pronoun-containing clause (kuliko “and” or waynyahamyen “because”), (ii) the presence/absence of the additive marker -to “also” in the pronoun-containing clause, and (iii) the presence/absence of the topic marker -(n)un on the subject of the preceding clause. As a whole, our results support the coherence-relation approach. We find that when a cue indicating a resemblance relation (either the connective and or the additive marker also) is present, null pronouns in both subject and object position tend to be interpreted as referring to an antecedent in a parallel syntactic position (subject and object respectively). This parallelism bias strengthens when a resemblance relation is signaled by both and and also. In contrast, when the two clauses are linked with because (indicating an explanation relation), null pronouns show no significant preference for either the subject or object antecedent. Topic-marking has no effect, possibly due to lack of context. Our study provides new evidence that both subject- and object-position null pronouns are sensitive to both syntactic and discourse-level factors.

Factual Imperfective Contexts in Polish

This study aims to account for the microvariation in aspect choices in factual imperfective contexts in Polish. To this goal an online questionnaire was conducted in which the participants from western and eastern Poland were asked to fill in the missing verbs in presuppositional and existential factual contexts involving an Elaboration coherence relation. The study shows that perfective aspect is preferred in presuppositional factual contexts and imperfective is preferred in existential factual contexts in both regions. Additionally, imperfective is generally more often used in factual contexts in eastern Poland than in western Poland. The study accounts for the observed preferences by resorting to the interaction between the Elaboration relation and (in)definiteness of the temporal variable (introduced at the level of AspP) with respect to the temporal trace of a complex event decomposed in the first phase syntax.

Discourse context modulates the effect of implicit causality on rementions

abstractCertain verbs tend to elicit explanations about either their subject or their object. The tendency for one of the verb’s arguments to be rementioned in explanations is known as the implicit causality bias. In this paper we investigate the conditions underlying implicit causality remention biases by means of sentence and story completion studies. On one account of implicit causality, remention biases are the product of a combination of a particular lexico-semantic structure with a causal coherence relation. According to a competing account, the biases arise from a perceived lack of information in the discourse, and thus depend on knowledge about the world and the discourse context. To distinguish between the two accounts, it first needs to be established that information that potentially competes with implicit causality, such as relevant information from the discourse context, can reliably influence remention biases. We provide evidence that a violation of implicit assumptions underlying the standard use of implicit causality verbs leads to different inferences, and an alteration of the remention bias. We thereby lay the groundwork for future studies to distinguish between the two accounts.

Together They Stand: Interpreting Not-At-Issue Content

Potts unified the account of appositives, parentheticals, expressives, and honorifics as 'Not- At-Issue’ (NAI) content, treating them as a natural class semantically in behaving like root (unembedded) structures, typically expressing speaker commitments, and being interpreted independently of At-Issue content. We propose that NAI content expresses a complete speech act distinct from the speech act of the containing utterance. The speech act hypothesis leads us to expect the semantic properties Potts established. We present experimental confirmation of two intuitive observations made by Potts: first that speech act adverbs should be acceptable as NAI content, supporting the speech act hypothesis; and second, that when two speech acts are expressed as successive sentences, the comprehender assumes they are related by some discourse coherence relation, whereas an NAI speech act need not bear a restrictive discourse coherence relation to its containing utterance, though overall sentences containing relevant content are rated more acceptable than those that do not. The speech act hypothesis accounts for these effects, and further accounts for why judgments of syntactic complexity or evaluations of whether or not a statement is true interact with the at-issue status of the material being judged or evaluated.

Semantic/pragmatic factors affecting the salience of transfer verb arguments

Rohde et al. (2006) showed that, for transfer verbs, the salience of the recipient argument is a function of the particular coherence relation posited by participants. Using a priming paradigm with transfer verbs and occupation-denoting NPs in isolated sentences, we find that participants are sensitive to the lexical properties of the transfer verb itself as measured by the relative salience of the associated transfer verb arguments. Alternatively, using a sentence completion paradigm—a more strategic task in which participants are guided by discourse-level features—we find participants are sensitive instead to the coherence relations of the relevant event, replicating Rohde et al. (2006). Our findings support the notion that coherence relations drive the interpretation of multi-sentence discourses while sentences considered in isolation are guided by particular features of the linguistic context.

Coherence relation and clause linkage

This paper proposes that adjunct island effects (Ross, 1967; Cattell, 1976) receive a discourse-semantic explanation. The exact formulation of this explanation builds upon previous work (e.g. Kehler, 2002) on island effects of conjuncts (Ross, 1967), which explains asymmetrical extraction from coordinate structures in English (that is, violations of the coordinate structure constraint) in terms of certain coherence relations (Hobbs, 1979). I show that asymmetric extraction from adjuncts in Chinese (that is, violations of the adjunct island constraint) is also sensitive to coherence relations. I argue that such similarities exist because coherence relations may be expressed by either a coordinative or a subordinative structure, and the variation in the syntactic realizations of coherence relations can be characterized through an independently motivated interclausal relations hierarchy that governs the mapping between semantics and syntactic linkage (van Valin, 2005).

Sloppy identity unbound

Reinhart (1983) claims that only pronouns whose antecedents c-command them may give rise to sloppy identity readings. This paper presents counterexamples to this claim; for instance, referring to the famous 1960 televised presidential debate, it is acceptable to say: "Kennedy looked good. People voted for him. Nixon looked bad. People didn't." Despite the fact that the antecedent "Kennedy" for the pronoun "him" is in a previous sentence, this pronoun allows a sloppy identity reading wherein the fourth sentence ("People didn't.") means that people didn't vote for Nixon. To analyze such cases, I first propose an extension to the ~ focus operator due to Rooth (1992), allowing this operator to alter the assignment function used to interpret pronouns. One construction where Rooth places ~ is in the answers to questions. My new meaning for ~ explains why pronouns are so constrained in answers, e.g., "Who does John like? He[=John] likes Mary." Next, I argue for the Question-Under-Discussion (QUD) model of discourse described in Roberts (1996), which theorizes that every sentence is the answer to an explicit or implicit question. Finally, I show that unbound sloppy identity can be analyzed as cases where pronouns are constrained by antecedents in implicit questions. Along the way, I argue that the QUD model is compatible with the coherence relation model of discourse due to Hobbs (1979), explaining how coherence can constrain pronoun reference as well.