Causal connectives have presuppositions. Effects on coherence and discourse structure

Readers may feel uncomfortable reading the sentence: Although Greta Garbo was considered to be the yardstick of beauty, she never married. “Why”, is their question, “does the writer want us to believe that normally, beautiful women marry?” The writer’s opinion they refer to, is not expressed in the sentence explicitly. However, all readers will infer this opinion, in order to make a sensible interpretation of the sentence: we expect beautiful women to marry, and the fact that Greta Garbo did not is an exception to this rule. The writer’s opinion is in fact a presupposition, triggered by the use of although. This book is a detailed study of the discourse semantic properties of causal connectives and their presuppositions. The interpretation process of connectives like although and because, and their Dutch counterparts, will be followed from the recognition of subtle meaning differences of a connective used in different contexts, an explanation for these differences in terms of presuppositions, an analysis of the way these presuppositions manipulate lexical knowledge to infer causal coherence relations and the effect of these coherence relations on antecedents of propositional anaphors in discourse structure. Everyone having an interest in semantics, pragmatics, discourse representation, argumentation, computational linguistics or the linguistic analysis of conjunction may want to read this book

Verbal redundancy in a procedural animation: On-screen labels improve retention but not behavioral performance

Multimedia learning research has shown that presenting the same words as spoken text and as written text to accompany graphical information hinders learning (i.e., redundancy effect). However, recent work showed that a “condensed” form of written text (i.e., on-screen labels) that overlaps with the spoken text, and thus is only partially redundant, can actually foster learning. This study extends this line of research by focusing on the usefulness of on-screen labels in an animation explaining a procedural task (i.e., first-aid procedure). The experiment had a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subject design (N = 129) with the factors spoken text (yes vs. no), written text (yes vs. no), and on-screen labels (yes vs. no). Learning outcomes were measured as retention accuracy and behavioral performance accuracy. Results showed that on-screen labels improved retention accuracy (but not behavioral performance accuracy) of the procedure, especially when presented together with spoken text. So, on-screen labels appear to be promising for learning from procedural animations

Deliberate ambiguity in slogans: recognition and appreciation

In slogans used in public information, politics, and advertising, and also in titles of books, documentaries, or articles, ambiguity is often employed to pique the interest of the reader in the message that is conveyed. According to several theories of text processing, this deliberate ambiguity may gain greater appreciation than slogans employing other rhetorical means. A special form of deliberate ambiguity is studied in this contribution: slogans that may be taken literally. The notion of salient meaning explains what happens when idiomatic meaning is reinterpreted into literal meaning, to fit the context. Instead of the esthetic experience often attributed to metaphorical expressions, this kind of ambiguity evokes humor. An experiment shows that deliberate ambiguity in slogans has a positive effect on appreciation. Recognition of the ambiguity is a strong factor in the appreciation of these slogans. Even nonambiguous slogans are appreciated more if they are recognized as ambiguous