Interpretation of Discourse Connectives Is Probabilistic: Evidence From the Study of <i>But</i> and <i>Although</i>

Asr, Fatemeh Torabi; Demberg, Vera

doi:10.1080/0163853x.2019.1700760

Cited by 19 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…It has also been shown that surprisal is linked with linguistic choice, low vs. high surprisal being correlated with reduced vs. fully expanded linguistic forms (Aylett and Turk, 2004;Levy, 2008;Mahowald et al, 2013). This holds across linguistic levels, from the phonetic to the grammatical and the discourse level (Delogu et al, 2017;Lemke et al, 2017;Sikos et al, 2017;Malisz et al, 2018;Asr and Demberg, 2020).…”

Section: Predictability and Uncertainty In Human Language Processingmentioning

confidence: 95%

Less is More/More Diverse: On The Communicative Utility of Linguistic Conventionalization

et al. 2021

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We present empirical evidence of the communicative utility of conventionalization, i.e., convergence in linguistic usage over time, and diversification, i.e., linguistic items acquiring different, more specific usages/meanings. From a diachronic perspective, conventionalization plays a crucial role in language change as a condition for innovation and grammaticalization (Bybee, 2010; Schmid, 2015) and diversification is a cornerstone in the formation of sublanguages/registers, i.e., functional linguistic varieties (Halliday, 1988; Harris, 1991). While it is widely acknowledged that change in language use is primarily socio-culturally determined pushing towards greater linguistic expressivity, we here highlight the limiting function of communicative factors on diachronic linguistic variation showing that conventionalization and diversification are associated with a reduction of linguistic variability. To be able to observe effects of linguistic variability reduction, we first need a well-defined notion of choice in context. Linguistically, this implies the paradigmatic axis of linguistic organization, i.e., the sets of linguistic options available in a given or similar syntagmatic contexts. Here, we draw on word embeddings, weakly neural distributional language models that have recently been employed to model lexical-semantic change and allow us to approximate the notion of paradigm by neighbourhood in vector space. Second, we need to capture changes in paradigmatic variability, i.e. reduction/expansion of linguistic options in a given context. As a formal index of paradigmatic variability we use entropy, which measures the contribution of linguistic units (e.g., words) in predicting linguistic choice in bits of information. Using entropy provides us with a link to a communicative interpretation, as it is a well-established measure of communicative efficiency with implications for cognitive processing (Linzen and Jaeger, 2016; Venhuizen et al., 2019); also, entropy is negatively correlated with distance in (word embedding) spaces which in turn shows cognitive reflexes in certain language processing tasks (Mitchel et al., 2008; Auguste et al., 2017). In terms of domain we focus on science, looking at the diachronic development of scientific English from the 17th century to modern time. This provides us with a fairly constrained yet dynamic domain of discourse that has witnessed a powerful systematization throughout the centuries and developed specific linguistic conventions geared towards efficient communication. Overall, our study confirms the assumed trends of conventionalization and diversification shown by diachronically decreasing entropy, interspersed with local, temporary entropy highs pointing to phases of linguistic expansion pertaining primarily to introduction of new technical terminology.

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Section: Predictability and Uncertainty In Human Language Processingmentioning

confidence: 95%

Less is More/More Diverse: On The Communicative Utility of Linguistic Conventionalization

et al. 2021

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“…Listeners predict upcoming material, such as the content of the following clause, based on the connective. Material is read slower (Asr & Demberg, 2020; Canestrelli et al, 2013; Scholman et al, 2017) or yields different brain responses (Köhne-Fuetterer et al, 2021; Xiang & Kuperberg, 2015) when it is not expected based on the connective. This is also reflected in faster reading times of clauses following a connective, compared to when no connective is present (Sanders & Noordman, 2000; van Silfhout et al, 2015) or an inappropriate connective is used (Canestrelli et al, 2013; Xu et al, 2018).…”

Section: The Effect Of Discourse Relational Cuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

How statistical correlations influence discourse-level processing: Clause type as a cue for discourse relations.

Marchal

Scholman

Demberg

2024

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Linguistic phenomena (e.g., words and syntactic structure) co-occur with a wide variety of meanings. These systematic correlations can help readers to interpret a text and create predictions about upcoming material. However, to what extent these correlations influence discourse processing is still unknown. We address this question by examining whether clause type serves as a cue for discourse relations. We found that the cooccurrence of gerund-free adjuncts and specific discourse relations found in natural language is also reflected in readers' offline expectations for discourse relations. However, we also found that clause structure did not facilitate the online processing of these discourse relations, nor that readers have a preference for these relations in a paraphrase selection task. The present research extends previous research on discourse relation processing, which mostly focused on lexical cues, by examining the role of non-semantic cues. We show that readers are aware of correlations between clause structure and discourse relations in natural language, but that, unlike what has been found for lexical cues, this information does not seem to influence online processing and discourse interpretation.

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“…For instance, the frequency of a connective in language use or its restriction to formal registers can make it less accessible for readers with low exposure to print (Zufferey and Gygax, 2020) and can cause immediate processing delays (Zufferey et al, 2018). In addition, when connectives can express multiple relations (e.g., but in contrast or concession, since in temporal or causal relations), comprehenders tend to be biased toward their most frequent meaning, while the secondary use is rated lower and read more slowly (Asr and Demberg, 2020). Similarly, the connective and can be found in many different discourse relations in corpora (Prasad et al, 2018) and in production data (Koornneef and Sanders, 2013).…”

Section: Processing Instructions For Discourse Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lexical and Structural Cues to Discourse Processing in First and Second Language

2021

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Discourse connectives are lexical items like “but” and “so” that are well-known to influence the online processing of the discourse relations they convey. Yet, discourse relations like causality or contrast can also be signaled by other means than connectives, such as syntactic structures. So far, the influence of these alternative signals for discourse processing has been comparatively under-researched. In particular, their processing in a second language remains entirely unexplored. In a series of three self-paced reading experiments, we compare the reading patterns of contrastive relations by native French-speakers and non-native speakers of French with English as a first language. We focus on the effect of syntactic parallelism and how it interacts with different types of connectives. We test whether native and non-native readers equally recruit parallelism to process contrast in combination with or without a connective (Experiment 1), with a frequent vs. infrequent connective (Experiment 2) and with an ambiguous vs. unambiguous connective (Experiment 3), thus varying the explicitness and ease of retrieval of the contrast relation. Our results indicate that parallelism plays an important role for both groups of readers, but that it is a more prominent cue for non-native speakers, while its effect is modulated by task difficulty for native participants.

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Interpretation of Discourse Connectives Is Probabilistic: Evidence From the Study of But and Although

Cited by 19 publications

References 44 publications

Less is More/More Diverse: On The Communicative Utility of Linguistic Conventionalization

Less is More/More Diverse: On The Communicative Utility of Linguistic Conventionalization

How statistical correlations influence discourse-level processing: Clause type as a cue for discourse relations.

Lexical and Structural Cues to Discourse Processing in First and Second Language

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