8. The processing of pragmatic information in discourse

Sanders, Ted; Canestrelli, Anneloes R.

doi:10.1515/9783110214215.201

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Connectedness refers to the unity of discourse established through the semantic and pragmatic relations between its elements on a local level (e.g., Glosser & Deser, 1991;Sanders & Canestrelli, 2012). Here as well we found the effects of lexical-semantic and morphological levels (lexical diversity, word-level errors), which can result in breakdowns of essential referential ties and an overall lack of continuity in a narrative.…”

Section: Connectednesssupporting

confidence: 56%

Linguistic mechanisms of coherence in aphasic and non-aphasic discourse

Linnik¹,

Bastiaanse

Stede

et al. 2021

Aphasiology

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Background:Coherence is the quality that distinguishes discourse from a random collection of sentences. People with aphasia have been reported to produce less-coherent discourse than non-language-impaired speakers. It is largely unclear how coherence is established in natural language and what leads to its impairment in aphasia. Aims: This paper presents a cross-methodological investigation on coherence in the discourse of Russian native speakers with and without aphasia. The purpose of this study was to examine the connection between language impairments in aphasia and different aspects of discourse coherence in order to determine the linguistic mechanisms that could be involved in establishing and maintaining it. Methods & Procedures: Coherence was operationalised as a combination of four aspects: informativeness, clarity, connectedness, and understandability. Twenty participants were asked to retell the content of a short movie. The retellings were annotated using Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), a formalistic framework for discourse-structure analysis. Next, they were evaluated for coherence on a four-point scale by trained raters. The ratings were compared between groups. A classification analysis was performed to determine whether the ratings could be predicted based on the macrolinguistic variables collected from the RST annotations and several microlinguistic variables previously linked to coherence. Result: Retellings produced by speakers with aphasia received lower ratings than those of control participants on all aspects of coherence. The results indicate that different combinations of microlinguistic and discourse-structure variables play a role in establishing each of the coherence aspects. Conclusions: Our results provided supporting evidence on coherence impairment in aphasia. Perception of a discourse as more or less coherent was associated with both microlinguistic and macrolinguistic variables, with different combinations of variables relevant for each of the aspects. Furthermore, we found that discourse structure plays an important role, especially for understandability. We speculate that pragmatic knowledge shared by interlocutors may boost the coherence of aphasic discourse.

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Section: Connectednesssupporting

confidence: 56%

Linguistic mechanisms of coherence in aphasic and non-aphasic discourse

Linnik¹,

Bastiaanse

Stede

et al. 2021

Aphasiology

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“…It contributes to our understanding of the relation between the linguistic and cognitive representation of narrative discourse in particular and extends previous research on the cognitive representation of written discourse in general (see, e.g. Sanders and Canestrelli 2012;Singer and Lea 2012). The conceptualization of narratives in terms of a dynamic network of mental spaces has proven valuable in uncovering the interplay between linguistic characteristics and inferences in the cognitive representation of narrative news discourse.…”

Section: Conclusion and Discussionsupporting

confidence: 60%

Smoothly moving through Mental Spaces: Linguistic patterns of viewpoint transfer in news narratives

Krieken

Sanders

2019

Cognitive Linguistics

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This article presents a Mental Space model for analyzing linguistic patterns in news narratives. The model was applied in a corpus study categorizing various linguistic markers of viewpoint transfers between the mental spaces that readers must conceptualize while processing news narratives: a Reality Space representing the journalist and reader’s projected here-and-now viewpoint; a News Narrative Space representing the newsworthy events from a there-and-then viewpoint; and an Intermediate Space representing the information of the news actors provided from a temporal viewpoint in-between the newsworthy events and the present. Viewpoint transfers and their markers were examined in a corpus of 100 Dutch crime news narratives published over a period of fifty years. The results reveal clear patterns, which indicate that both linguistic structures and narrative-based as well as genre-based inferences play a role in the processing of news narratives. The results furthermore clarify how these narratives have been gradually crystallizing into a genre over the past decades. These findings elucidate the complex yet fluent process of conceptually moving between mental spaces, thus advancing our understanding of the relation between the linguistic and the cognitive representation of narrative discourse.

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“…The chapters of this dissertation are written as individual papers; Chapter 3 has already been accepted for publication in the international journal Language and Cognitive Processes (Canestrelli, Mak, & Sanders, 2012). Parts of the introduction and Chapter 2 have been published as a chapter in Handbook of Cognitive Pragmatics (Sanders & Canestrelli, 2012). Other chapters will soon be submitted to other journals 4 .…”

Section: Reading Guidementioning

confidence: 99%

On the online effects of subjectivity encoded in causal connectives

Fang

Mak

Evers-Vermeul

et al. 2017

RCL

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Causal relations between sentences differ in terms of subjectivity: they can be objective (based on facts) or subjective (based on reasoning). Subjective relations lead to longer reading times than objective relations. Causal connectives differ in the degree to which they encode this subjectivity. The Chinese connectives kejian ‘so’ and yin’er ‘so’ specify a high and low degree of subjectivity, respectively, whereas suoyi ‘so’ is underspecified for subjectivity. In an eye-tracking experiment we compare the effect of the specificity of these connectives in subjective and objective relations. In objective relations, the specificity of the connective has no effect on reading times. In subjective relations, reading times are shorter in sentences with the specified connective kejian than in sentences with the underspecified connective suoyi. These results suggest that readers prefer to interpret a relation as objective. Computing subjective relations requires extra processing time, which is diminished when the connective encodes the subjectivity.

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8. The processing of pragmatic information in discourse

Cited by 8 publications

References 45 publications

Linguistic mechanisms of coherence in aphasic and non-aphasic discourse

Linguistic mechanisms of coherence in aphasic and non-aphasic discourse

Smoothly moving through Mental Spaces: Linguistic patterns of viewpoint transfer in news narratives

On the online effects of subjectivity encoded in causal connectives

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