Processing Non-at-Issue Meanings of Conditional Connectives: The wenn/falls Contrast in German

Logical connectives in natural language pose challenges to truth-conditional semantics due to pragmatics and gradience in their meaning. This paper reports on a case study of the conditional connectives (CCs) wenn/falls ‘if/when, if/in case’ in German. Using distributional evidence, I argue that wenn and falls differ in lexical pragmatics: They express different degrees of speaker commitment (i.e., credence) toward the modified antecedent proposition at the non-at-issue dimension. This contrast can be modeled using the speaker commitment scale (Giannakidou and Mari, 2016), i.e., More committedLess committed. Four experiments are reported which tested the wenn/falls contrast, as well as the summary of an additional one from Liu (2019). Experiment 1 tested the naturalness of sentences containing the CCs (wenn or falls) and conditional antecedents with varying degrees of likelihood (very likely/likely/unlikely). The starting prediction was that falls might be degraded in combination with very likely and likely events in comparison to the other conditions, which was not borne out. Experiment 2 used the forced lexical choice paradigm, testing the choice between wenn and falls in the doxastic agent’s conditional thought, depending on their belief or disbelief in the antecedent. The finding was that subjects chose falls significantly more often than wenn in the disbelief-context, and vice versa in the belief-context. Experiment 3 tested the naturalness of sentences with CCs and an additional relative clause conveying the speaker’s belief or disbelief in the antecedent. An interaction was found: While in the belief-context, wenn was rated more natural than falls, the reverse pattern was found in the disbelief-context. While the results are mixed, the combination of the findings in Experiment 2, Experiment 3 and that of Experiment 4a from Liu (2019) that falls led to lower speaker commitment ratings than wenn, provide evidence for the CC scale. Experiment 4b tested the interaction between two speaker commitment scales, namely, one of connectives (including weil ‘because’ and wenn/falls) and the other of adverbs (factive vs. non-factive, Liu, 2012). While factive and non-factive adverbs were rated equally natural for the factive causal connective, non-factive adverbs were preferred over factive ones by both CCs, with no difference between wenn and falls. This is discussed together with the result in Liu (2019), where the wenn/falls difference occurred in the absence of negative polarity items (NPIs), but disappeared in the presence of NPIs. This raises further questions on how different speaker commitment scales interact and why.Peer Reviewe

The elastic nonveridicality property of indicative conditionals

Indicative conditionals are known to have the semantic property of nonveridicality, that is, they do not entail the truth of the antecedent. In this paper, I argue that the nonveridicality property of indicative conditionals is elastic in that it can be affected by the choice of conditional connectives and negative polarity items. Two experiments are reported, one on German and the other on English. They show that in both languages, the presence of negative polarity items conveys a weakened speaker commitment towards the antecedent, although there is cross-linguistic variation concerning the effect of conditional connectives.Deutsche ForschungsgemeinschaftPeer Reviewe

Learning Explicit and Implicit Arabic Discourse Relations.

We propose in this paper a supervised learning approach to identify discourse relations in Arabic texts. To our knowledge, this work represents the first attempt to focus on both explicit and implicit relations that link adjacent as well as non adjacent Elementary Discourse Units (EDUs) within the Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT). We use the Discourse Arabic Treebank corpus (D-ATB) which is composed of newspaper documents extracted from the syntactically annotated Arabic Treebank v3.2 part3 where each document is associated with complete discourse graph according to the cognitive principles of SDRT. Our list of discourse relations is composed of a three-level hierarchy of 24 relations grouped into 4 top-level classes. To automatically learn them, we use state of the art features whose efficiency has been empirically proved. We investigate how each feature contributes to the learning process. We report our experiments on identifying fine-grained discourse relations, mid-level classes and also top-level classes. We compare our approach with three baselines that are based on the most frequent relation, discourse connectives and the features used by Al-Saif and Markert (2011). Our results are very encouraging and outperform all the baselines with an F-score of 78.1% and an accuracy of 80.6%

Discourse Structure in Machine Translation Evaluation

In this article, we explore the potential of using sentence-level discourse structure for machine translation evaluation. We first design discourse-aware similarity measures, which use all-subtree kernels to compare discourse parse trees in accordance with the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Then, we show that a simple linear combination with these measures can help improve various existing machine translation evaluation metrics regarding correlation with human judgments both at the segment- and at the system-level. This suggests that discourse information is complementary to the information used by many of the existing evaluation metrics, and thus it could be taken into account when developing richer evaluation metrics, such as the WMT-14 winning combined metric DiscoTKparty. We also provide a detailed analysis of the relevance of various discourse elements and relations from the RST parse trees for machine translation evaluation. In particular we show that: (i) all aspects of the RST tree are relevant, (ii) nuclearity is more useful than relation type, and (iii) the similarity of the translation RST tree to the reference tree is positively correlated with translation quality.Comment: machine translation, machine translation evaluation, discourse analysis. Computational Linguistics, 201

Aspects of Linguistic Variation

This volume brings together papers on linguistic variation. It takes a broad perspective, covering not only crosslinguistic and diachronic but also intralinguistic and interspeaker variation, and examines phenomena ranging from negation and TAM over connectives and the lexicon to definite articles and comparative concepts in well- and lesser-known languages. The collection thus contributes to our understanding of variation in general

The Acquisition of Past Temporality by Two ESL Learners at Different Levels of Proficiency

The acquisition of English past temporality has been a topic of discussion in the second language acquisition field. Most of the studies have looked at a case study or a group of learners of the same level of proficiency. The findings indicated that learners with low proficiency level keep relying on using the lexical means as their verbal morphology begin established. No study has compared between two case studies or two group of different level of proficiency to find whether this phenomenon can be true with learners of different level of proficiency. This study sought to find this by examining the development of English past temporality with two case studies of learners of English as a second language. Each learner was interviewed for 20 minutes. The results indicated that there is a difference between the two learners in terms of the level of English past temporality mastery. However, it was found that even the second learner has reached a level of mastery of English past temporality; he still relies on using the lexical means

A semantic and pragmatic explanation of harmony

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.This paper introduces a semantically and pragmatically oriented typological generalisation, which is named the orientation principle. It entails that the position of connectives, as defined as a single lexical category including adpositions and conjunctions, provides an explanatory principle for a number of harmonic correlations in crosslinguistic data. A reanalysis of the data guided by this insight is proposed as an alternative to processing approaches.Peer reviewe

Jiu-conditionals in Mandarin Chinese: thoughts on a uniform pragmatic analysis of Mandarin conditional constructions

Conditionals in Mandarin can be expressed by conjunctive sentences with no overt conditional connective (Type 1: P, Q) or with a conditional connective (CC) in the antecedent (Type 2: CC P, Q) and/or a conditional particle (CP) in the consequent (Type 3: (CC) P, CP Q). In this paper, we focus on jiu-conditionals (Type 3) without CCs. We assume that jiu in Mandarin is ambiguous between jiu 1 (unstressed, nonexclusive, left associating) and jiu 2 (stressed, exclusive, right associating), and that jiu-conditionals involve jiu 1 without exclusive force. We argue against a conditional conjunction analysis of jiu-conditionals and for a scalar analysis of jiu in conditionals as well as in temporal or spatial use. Furthermore, we present what we believe is the first uniform pragmatic account of Mandarin conditional constructions across Types 1–3: it is the subjective (non)veridicality property of the first clause P that determines the reading of the sentence P, Q. If P is entailed or presupposed, we get a conjunctive reading; if P is not entailed or presupposed, that is, if it is nonveridical, we get a conditional reading. Devices triggering the conditional reading include CCs or negative polarity items in the antecedent, as well as the broader discourse context or world knowledge.Deutsche ForschungsgemeinschaftPeer Reviewe

A Qualitative Analysis of Cohesion in Narrative ELT Writing: The Case of Struggling Student Writers

EFL writing has been a magnet for intensive research over the years. Such importance has sprung from the realization that writing is instrumental for success in the academia. Most of the research conducted in this regard has focused on sentence-level aspects of composition. Indeed, scarce have been the studies that have attempted to explore inter-sentential, rhetorical components of EFL learners‟ writing. The current research therefore aims to contribute to this line of inquiry by investigating the nature of the linguistic resources that freshmen drew upon to produce cohesive narrative text. Adopting Halliday and Hasan‟s (1976) conceptual framework of cohesion, the study attempted to qualitatively identify the problems with which these students grapple to foster cohesion in their texts. Based on analytic ratings, the researcher selected 40 narrative essays produced by low-ability freshmen. The findings indicated that poor students had major issues when they wanted to use cohesive devices in their narrative essays. With regard to reference ties, the students overused first person singular pronoun I, employed demonstratives whose antecedents could not be recovered from the text, and misused, omitted or unnecessarily used the definite article. Conjunction ties in poor students‟ writings were either overused or misused. Finally, the narratives of the students excessively contained same-item repetitions, had fewer occurrences of synonyms as means of cohesion, and confused false synonyms. The implications of the findings for more effective writing instruction will be discussed

Aspects of Linguistic Variation

This volume brings together papers on linguistic variation. It takes a broad perspective, covering not only crosslinguistic and diachronic but also intralinguistic and interspeaker variation, and examines phenomena ranging from negation and TAM over connectives and the lexicon to definite articles and comparative concepts in well- and lesser-known languages. The collection thus contributes to our understanding of variation in general