The role of non-connective discourse cues and their interaction with connectives

Dados Bibliográficos

ID20484170
AutoresLudivine Crible (0000-0001-6300-2765, UCLouvain), Vera Demberg (0000-0002-8834-0020, Saarland University)
Ano2020
Volume27
Fascículo2
Páginas313-338
Data de publicação2020-12-31
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoPragmatics & Cognition (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0929-0907 • E-ISSN: 1569-9943
EditoraJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/pc.20003.cri
OpenAlexW3154943736
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas30

The disambiguation and processing of coherence relations is often investigated with a focus on explicit connectives, such as but or so . Other, non-connective cues from the context also facilitate discourse inferences, although their precise disambiguating role and interaction with connectives have been largely overlooked in the psycholinguistic literature so far. This study reports on two crowdsourcing experiments that test the role of contextual cues (parallelism, antonyms, resultative verbs) in the disambiguation of contrast and consequence relations. We compare the effect of contextual cues in conceptually different relations, and with connectives that differ in their semantic precision. Using offline tasks, our results show that contextual cues significantly help disambiguating contrast and consequence relations in the absence of connectives. However, when connectives are present in the context, the effect of cues only holds if the connective is acceptable in the target relation. Overall, our study suggests that cues are decisive on their own, but only secondary in the presence of connectives. These results call for further investigation of the complex interplay between connective types, contextual cues, relation types and other linguistic and cognitive factors

Cognitive psychology · Linguistics · Computer Science · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · linguistics and terminology studies · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Psychology · Artificial Intelligence