Michel Charolles

Temporal and spatial dimensions of discourse organisation

Time is generally recognised as a ubiquitous component in the way discourse is organised: the discourse-level analysis of time has led to numerous studies, mostly focused on verb tense and temporal adverbials. The discourse role of space seems less obvious: not only is space not systematically marked in the sentence, but it does not lead in itself to any discourse relation. In addition to “classical” approaches, which all deal with connection between (groups of) clauses, we present another approach: Discourse Framing. A discourse frame is described as the grouping together of a number of sentences which are linked by the fact that they must be interpreted with reference to a specific criterion, realised in an initial introducing expression.

Associative anaphora and its interpretation

Abstract When readers or hearers interpret a definite associative NP, they must take into account that all definite NPs carry a presupposition of existential uniqueness. This implies that hearers or readers can access an entity which is presented as the only one of the type expressed by the N of the definite NP. In the case of associative definites which introduce a new entity, this entity must be easily accessible through, for instance, a definite NP1. Stereotypical part-whole relations are a case in point where such accessibility exists between the entities designated by NP1 and NP2. The fact that a definite associative NP2 must be supported by an accessibility relation explains why the use of a definite associative NP2 comes across as strange, should a part-whole relation be transitive. Problems also arise when the hearer or reader has no previous knowledge about the links between the entities denoted by the definite NP2 and the preceding NP1. In this case the context may offer several candidates for the role of antecedent and favor a coreferential or associative interpretation. The last part of the paper is devoted to a discussion of examples of this type of context and argues in favour of an approach to associative anaphora that takes into account diverse, and possibly contradictory, contextual clues in the utterance where NP1 is employed.

Aspects of Textual Continuity Linguistic Approaches

Publisher Summary This chapter provides groundwork, which helps to situate new studies and sets the stage for a general discussion regarding the potential interest of an intersection of approaches in linguistics and psycholinguistics. Interest in linguistics focused on identifying the roles and nature of different markers of text continuity or connectedness used for text composition and construction in different languages. A discussion regarding the current issues in the growing body of literature devoted to markers of text cohesion and connexity. The generally accepted framework allowed researchers to concentrate on specific aspects of text, as the role of topicalization or the lexicon in a text grammar, and the construction of macrostructures.

Aspects of Textual Continuity Psycholinguistic Approaches

Publisher Summary This chapter examines the mental operations involved in processing of cohesion markers, the new perspectives, and the problem of the immediacy of referential resolution. Three major features characterize the diversity of studies in this area: a) Investigations of text continuity used widely varying materials, sentence pairs, or texts of varying length. For the most part, materials have been restricted to narratives, with rare examples of descriptive or expository texts. The theoretical issues and the experimental designs behind such experiments are not identical. Methods have changed over the past 10 years. This evolution is due to replacement of classic off-line procedures such as sentence completion, coherence judgment, and recall, by on-line paradigms, which provide a more direct approach to mental operations. The third feature concerns theory. Early studies aimed at identifying the procedures used to search for intersentential referents.

Effect on Comprehension of Preposed versus Postposed Adverbial Phrases.

A challenge for psycholinguistics is to describe how linguistic cues influence the construction of the mental representation resulting from the comprehension of a text. In this paper, we will focus on one of these linguistic devices: the sentence-initial positioning of spatial adverbials such as In the park.... Three self-paced reading experiments were conducted to test the ‘Discourse Framing Hypothesis’ according to which preposed adverbials can be seen as frame builders announcing that incoming contents satisfy the same informational criterion specified by the adverbial. Our results indicate that spatial adverbials do not play the same role when they are in sentence-initial and in sentence-final position. These results are discussed in the framework of Zwaan’s Event Indexing Model.