The role of interclausal connectives in narrative structuring
Evidence from adults' interpretations of simple stories
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11273159 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Erwin M Segal (University at Buffalo, State University of New York, corresponding author), Judith Felson Duchan (0000-0003-1218-0400, University at Buffalo, State University of New York), Paula J Scott (University at Buffalo, State University of New York) |
| Year | 1991 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 27-54 |
| Publication date | 1991-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Discourse Processes (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-853X • E-ISSN: 1532-6950 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/01638539109544773 |
| OpenAlex | W2074376769 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 35 |
| References cited | 25 |
This study explores the role of interclausal connectives as a set of linguistic devices which help the reader interpret a narrative text. We show that: (a) even simple narrative texts have a range of interpretations; (b) the variability of the interpretations decreases with the presence of the interclausal connectives; (c) the role of two connectives, then and and, serve primarily to identify variations in continuity between information in the incoming clause and previously known events; (d) so, because, and but signal causality or adversity and do so primarily from a subjective perspective; and (e) the interpretation of a particular clause in the text may be affected by story events whether or not they are actually expressed in the text. We compare four possible views of how interclausal connectives function in narratives: an empty view, a local cohesion view, a global marker view, and a mental model‐deictic shift view. The data support the fourth view, in which readers use interclausal connectives to signal deictic continuity or discontinuity in their mental representation of the story
Causality (physics · Cognition · Cognitive psychology · Cohesion (chemistry · Deixis · Grammar · Interpretation (philosophy · Linguistics · Mental representation · Narrative · Perspective (graphical · Representation (politics · Simple past · Computer Science · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Philosophy · Psychology · Reading and Literacy Development · Artificial Intelligence
Age- and ability-related differences in young readers' use of conjunctions
The Signaling of Continuative and Contrastive Discourse Relations in English Argumentative Discourse
The counterargumentative connection in Italian
Grasping the Logic Behind
Signalling conditional relations
Interacción entre conectores y conocimiento previo en el procesamiento de la coherencia causal
Temporal connectives and verbal tenses as processing instructions
From implicit to explicit
Continuative and contrastive discourse relations across discourse domains
Adjustment, mismatches and accommodation of procedural and conceptual meaning
Continuity in discourse relations
Explicitness and implicitness of discourse relations in a multilingual discourse bank
Using connectives in oral French narratives
Bilingual discourse markers in Puerto Rican Spanish
Prediction of global ratings of fluency and delivery in narrative discourse by linguistic and phonetic measures- oral performances of students aged 11-12 years
Causation and Causal Relations
Understanding Understanding
Socio-cognitive influences on translating forward causal connectives
Differences in continuity of force dynamics and emotional valence in sentences with causal and adversative connectives
The Rhetorical Parsing of Unrestricted Texts
Experimentally assessing the roles of grammatical aspect, lexical aspect and coreference patterns for the inference of temporal relations in English
Narrative Organization and Contextual Constraints
Showing structure
The edges of words
Propositional Integration and World-Knowledge Inference
Causal connectives increase inference generation
Person and tense in narrative interpretation
Making a list
The role of temporal segmentation markers in discourse processing
Time, space, and action
Using linguistic phenomena to motivate a set of coherence relations
Segmentation markers as trace and signal of discourse structure
Cognitive complexity and the linguistic marking of coherence relations
The classification of coherence relations and their linguistic markers
Conjunction in sentence and discourse
Transparent Minds
Discourse Markers
Cohesion in English
A Mathematical Theory of Communication
Causal thinking and the representation of narrative events
Mental Models in Narrative Comprehension
“Cloze Procedure”
Causal relatedness and importance of story events
Sentence memory
Notes on a Schema for Stories
Cognitive structures in comprehension and memory of narrative discourse
Logic and Conversation
Language and communication.
Complex sentences
Experiments on story comprehension and recall∗
The Pear Stories
Mental Models
New Directions in Discourse Processing
Cognition and Symbolic Processes
Unspeakable sentences
A tale of two structures
| Unique citing works | 35 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,09 |
| Citation span | 1994 - 2026 (33) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 34 |