Gisela Redeker

Ideational and pragmatic markers of discourse structure

Abstract This paper presents an integrative approach to the study of discourse coherence which follows the observation of Buhler (1934) and others that language use always involves both the representation of propositional content and the expression of attitudes and intentions. Consideration of only one of these functions is shown to be insufficient for an adequate account of discourse coherence. Coherence is regarded as arising from semantic relations between the ideas states and pragmatic relations between the actions performed in speaking or writing. Empirical evidence for this view is provided by the use of pragmatic and ideational structuring devices in film descriptions. Speakers who were describing a film to a friend used more markers of pragmatic structure than those whose listener was a stranger. At the same time, they were less explicit in indicating the ideational structure of their discourse. This trade-off between pragmatic and ideational structuring occurred not only in dialogues (two-way auditory channel where the friends gave more feedback, but also in monologues (one-way channel), where the two conditions differed only in the speakers knowledge that the listener was a friend or a stranger.

Linguistic perspective in short news stories

character’s discourse or consciousness. Subtle perspective that introduces an implicit viewpoint, is accomplished by a variety of linguistic features such as tense shifts and marked choices of referring expressions. The effect of the two kinds of perspective on readers’ appreciation of news texts and stories was tested in two experiments. In Experiment 1, news text and story versions with subtle and strong perspective were presented along with neutralized versions. Focalization made news text versions unacceptable, but was unproblematic in story versions, Text versions with focalization were judged as more subjective, more suspenseful, and livelier than versions without perspective. The failure of subtle perspective alone to show reliable effects in this experiment may have been due to the presence of the unacceptable focalized versions. Those versions were excluded from Experiment 2, where versions with subtle perspective were compared to neutralized versions. This restricted comparison yielded a positive effect of subtle perspective on acceptability and affective judgments.

Less is not more: Neural responses to missing and superfluous accents in context

Prosody, particularly accent, aids comprehension by drawing attention to important elements such as the information that answers a question. A study using ERP registration investigated how the brain deals with the interpretation of prosodic prominence. Sentences were embedded in short dialogues and contained accented elements that were congruous or incongruous with respect to a preceding question. In contrast to previous studies, no explicit prosodic judgment task was added. Robust effects of accentuation were evident in the form of an “accent positivity” (200–500 msec) for accented elements irrespective of their congruity. Our results show that incongruously accented elements, that is, superfluous accents, activate a specific set of neural systems that is inactive in case of incongruously unaccented elements, that is, missing accents. Superfluous accents triggered an early positivity around 100 msec poststimulus, followed by a right-lateralized negative effect (N400). This response suggests that redundant information is identified immediately and leads to the activation of a neural system that is associated with semantic processing (N400). No such effects were found when contextually expected accents were missing. In a later time window, both missing and superfluous accents triggered a late positivity on midline electrodes, presumably related to making sense of both kinds of mismatching stimuli. These results challenge previous findings of greater processing for missing accents and suggest that the natural processing of prosody involves a set of distinct, temporally organized neural systems.

Genre-dependent interaction of coherence and lexical cohesion in written discourse

Abstract We investigate the interaction between coherence and lexical cohesion in expository and persuasive texts using seven encyclopedia texts and seven fundraising letters. We describe genre structure in terms of genre-specific moves and coherence structure with Rhetorical Structure Theory. For lexical cohesion, we identify repetitions, systematic semantic relations and collocations across discourse units, modeled as weighted multigraphs. By comparing the prominence of discourse units in the coherence structure with the centrality in the lexical cohesion structure in the two genres, we show that lexical cohesion is closely aligned with coherence in the expository texts, but not in the persuasive texts.

Fill the Gap! Combining Pragmatic and Prosodic Information to Make Gapping Easy.

Two studies investigated the effects of prosody and pragmatic context on off-line and on-line processing of sentences like John greeted Paul yesterday and Ben today. Such sentences are ambiguous between the so-called ‘nongapping’ reading, where John greeted Ben, and the highly unpreferred ‘gapping’ reading, where Ben greeted Paul. In the first experiment, participants listened to dialogues and gave a speeded response as to which reading of an ambiguous target sentence first comes to mind. In the second experiment, they also responded to a visual probe that was presented during the presentation of the ambiguous target. The results show that context and prosody have independent and strong effects on both on-line processing and off-line interpretation of gapping; in the right combination they can make gapping as easy as the normally preferred nongapping reading.

Multimodal analysis of quotation in oral narratives

Abstract We investigate direct speech quotation in informal oral narratives by analyzing the contribution of bodily articulators (character viewpoint gestures, character facial expression, character intonation, and the meaningful use of gaze) in three quote environments, or quote sequences – single quotes, quoted monologues and quoted dialogues – and in initial vs. non-initial position within those sequences. Our analysis draws on findings from the linguistic and multimodal realization of quotation, where multiple articulators are often observed to be co-produced with single direct speech quotes (e.g. Thompson & Suzuki 2014), especially on the so-called left boundary of the quote (Sidnell 2006). We use logistic regression to model multimodal quote production across and within quote sequences, and find unique sets of multimodal articulators accompanying each quote sequence type. We do not, however, find unique sets of multimodal articulators which distinguish initial from non-initial utterances; utterance position is instead predicted by type of quote and presence of a quoting predicate. Our findings add to the growing body of research on multimodal quotation, and suggest that the multimodal production of quotation is more sensitive to the number of characters and utterances which are quoted than to the difference between introducing and maintaining a quoted characters’ perspective.

Comprehension of marked pronouns in Spanish and English: Object anaphors cross-linguistically

Previous research on pronoun resolution has identified several individual factors that are deemed to be important for resolving reference. In this paper, we argue that of these factors, as tested here, plausibility is the most important, but interacts with form markedness and structural parallelism. We investigated how listeners resolved object pronouns that were ambiguous in the sense of having more than one possible antecedent. We manipulated the form of the anaphoric expression in terms of accentuation (English: Experiments 1a and 2a) and morphology (Spanish: Experiments 1b and 2b). We looked at sentences where both antecedents were equally plausible, or where only one of the antecedents was plausible. Listeners generally resolved toward the (parallel) grammatical object of the previous clause. When the pronouns were marked due to accentuation (English) or use of specific morphology (Spanish), preference switched to the alternative antecedent, the grammatical subject of the previous clause. In contrast, when one of the two antecedents was a much more plausible antecedent than the other, antecedent choice was almost wholly dictated by plausibility, although reference form prominence did significantly attenuate the strength of the preference.