Meaning and grammar seminar

Speaker: Marian Marchal (Universität des Saarlandes)

Title: Beyond connectives: (Extra-)linguistic cues for inferring discourse relations

Abstract: Connectives like because or nevertheless have been shown to play an important role in processing the relation between different propositions in a text. However, the majority of discourse relations are not signaled by a connective and the relation between different clauses can often still be established. In this talk, I present a series of studies on the role of extra-linguistic (domain knowledge), meta-linguistic (genre) and syntactical (clause structure) cues for discourse relations.

The results from the various studies show that readers employ information from different linguistic and extra-linguistic sources to infer discourse relations. However, they also reveal the limits of the influence of these cues on discourse processing. For example, background knowledge is a prerequisite for using some non-connective linguistic signals. Furthermore, the results of different on-line and off-line tasks are not always in line. These findings shed more light on the nature of non-connective cues and the extent to which they influence discourse processing.