The Effect of Thematic Roles on Pronoun Use and Frequency of Reference Continuation

Goal and source thematic roles have been shown to influence pronoun resolution, an effect that has been linked to the reader’s tendency to focus on the consequences of the event (Stevenson, Crawley, & Kleinman, 1994). Using a story continuation ex-periment, I show that speakers also tend to use pronouns more often for goal entities than source entities. Furthermore, the experiment and a corpus analysis reveal that speakers tend to refer more frequently to goal entities than source entities overall. I use the parallel findings about pronoun use and frequency of reference continuation to argue that referent accessibility is influenced by the comprehender’s estimate of the likelihood that a referent will be continued in the discourse. Pronoun comprehension has been argued to be influenced by the accessibility of potential referents in the discourse representation, which is driven by a number of factors (see Arnold, 1998, for a review). One such factor that has received atten-tion is the thematic roles of discourse referents (e.g., Garnham, Traxler, Oakhill

Accent Interpretation, Anaphora Resolution and Implicature Derivation

Abstract not available

Information structure and the accessibility of clausally introduced referents

This paper will examine the role of various factors in affecting the salience, and hence the accessibility to pronominal reference, of entities introduced into a discourse by a full clause. We begin with the premise that the possibility of pronominal reference with it versus that depends on the cognitive status of the referent, in the sense of Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski (1993). This formulation of the problem provides grounds for an explanation of the data presented above, and provides a framework within which we examine the role of various other factors in promoting the salience of a clausally introduced entity, including the information structure of the utterance in which the entity is introduced. For entities introduced by clausal complements to bridge verbs, we show that the information structure of the utterance introducing the entity has a partial, or one-sided, effect on the salience of the entity. When the complement clause is focal, the salience of the entity depends only on its referential givenness-newness (in the sense of Gundel 1988, 1999b), as we would expect. But when the complement clause is ground material, the salience of an entity introduced by the clause is enhanced. Other factors, including the presuppositionality of factive and interrogative complements, also serve to enhance the salience of entities introduced by complement clauses

Under-explicit and minimally explicit reference: Evidence from a longitudinal case study

This chapter reports on a 2 ½ year longitudinal case study of one Korean speaker of English, focusing on the development of her command of accessibility marking in referring to persons. The data are derived from informal, open interviews spanning the entire length of the participant’s enrolment in a Bachelor of Nursing programme in New Zealand. These interviews occurred every few weeks during semester (17 in total), and were typically between 45 minutes to one hour in length. The participant reported that she used these interviews as “a kind of reflective journal”, in which she discussed her classes, interactions with classmates, tutors and others, her assignments, and other experiences in New Zealand. The events she reported are rich in references to individuals. Using a previously reported coding scheme (Ryan, 2015), these data were analysed in relation to pragmatic felicity, particularly concerning the felicity of accessibility marking for referents of varying cognitive status in contexts of topic or focus continuity or shift. These data [yet to be analysed] provide evidence of the developmental progression of the participant’s command of reference in English. This chapter contributes substantially to the literature in several ways. In general, there has been a lack of longitudinal case studies of pragmatic development in any domain, including few – if any – previous longitudinal studies focusing on reference; the present analysis is therefore expected to reveal previously unreported details of the trajectory of pragmatic development in reference. The present study is also one of the few working with oral data that was generated in ways other than an elicited communication task. Finally, the study contributes to the somewhat still contentious issue of to what extent mainstream study in an English-speaking context leads to genuine language gains

(De)accenting definite descriptions

This paper focuses on definite descriptions. It will be shown that a definite description refers to a given discourse referent if the descriptive content is completely deaccented. But if there is a focussed element within the descriptive content it introduces a novel referent. This amounts to allowing two readings for definite descriptions without, however, allowing two readings for the definite article

Between anaphora and deixis...the resolution of the demonstrative noun-phrase ‘that N’

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that the demonstrative noun phrase (NP) that N, as an anadeictic expression, preferentially refers to the less salient referent in a discourse representation when used anaphorically, whereas the anaphoric pronoun he or she preferentially refers to the highly-focused referent. The findings, from a sentence completion task and two reading time experiments that used gender to create ambiguous and unambiguous coreference, reveal that the demonstrative NP specifically orients processing toward a less salient referent when there is no gender cue discriminating between different possible referents. These findings show the importance of taking into account the discourse function of the anaphor itself and its influence on the process of searching for the referent

Speakers use their own discourse model to determine referents' accessibility during the production of referring expressions.

We report two experiments that investigated the widely-held assumption that speakers use the addressee's discourse model when choosing referring expressions, by manipulating whether the addressee could hear the immediately preceding linguistic context. Experiment 1 showed that speakers increased pronoun use (relative to definite NPs) when the referent was mentioned in the immediately preceding sentence compared to when it was not, but whether their addressee heard that the referent was mentioned had no effect, indicating that speakers use their own, privileged discourse model when choosing referring expressions. The same pattern of results was found in Experiment 2. Speakers produced fewer pronouns when the immediately preceding sentence mentioned a referential competitor than when it mentioned the referent, but this effect did not differ depending on whether the sentence was shared with their addressee. Thus, we conclude that choice of referring expression is determined by the referent's accessibility in the speaker’s own discourse model rather than the addressee's

Referential and visual cues to structural choice in visually situated sentence production

We investigated how conceptually informative (referent preview) and conceptually uninformative (pointer to referent’s location) visual cues affect structural choice during production of English transitive sentences. Cueing the Agent or the Patient prior to presenting the target-event reliably predicted the likelihood of selecting this referent as the sentential Subject, triggering, correspondingly, the choice between active and passive voice. Importantly, there was no difference in the magnitude of the general Cueing effect between the informative and uninformative cueing conditions, suggesting that attentionally driven structural selection relies on a direct automatic mapping mechanism from attentional focus to the Subject’s position in a sentence. This mechanism is, therefore, independent of accessing conceptual, and possibly lexical, information about the cued referent provided by referent preview

Accessibility of referent information influences sentence planning : An eye-tracking study

Acknowledgments We thank Phoebe Ye and Gouming Martens for help with data collection for Experiment 1 and 2, respectively. This research was supported by the European Research Council for the ERC Starting Grant (206198) to YC.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Non-situational functions of demonstrative noun phrases in Lingala (Bantu)

This paper examines the non-situational (i.e., non-exophoric) pragmatic functions of the three adnominal demonstratives, oyo, wand, and yango in the Bantu language Lingala. An examination of natural language corpora reveals that, although native-speaker intuitions sanction the use of oyo as an anaphor in demonstrative NPs, this demonstrative is hardly ever used in that role. It also reveals that wand, which has both situational and discourse-referential capacities, is used more frequently than the exclusively anaphoric demonstrative yango. It is explained that wand appears in a wide range of non-coreferential expression types, in coreferential expression types involving low-salience referents, and in coreferential expression types that both involve highly salient referents and include the speaker's desire to signal a shift in the mental representation of the referent towards a pejorative reading. The use of yango, on the other hand, is only licensed in cases of coreferentiality involving highly salient referents and implying continuation of the same mental representation of the referent. A specific section is devoted to charting the possible grammaticalization paths followed by the demonstratives. Conclusions are drawn for pragmatic theory formation in terms of the relation between form (yango vs. wand) and function (coreferentiality vs. non-coreferentiality)