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Using referential processing in discourse featuring implicit causality verbs as a test case, we demonstrate how a discourse's causal and temporal dimensions interact. We show that referential processing is affected by multiple discourse biases, and that these biases do not have uniform effects. In three discourse continuation experiments, we show that the bias to re-mention a particular referent in discourse involving implicit causality verbs is not only affected by the verb's implicit causality bias, but also by the discourse's temporal structure, which at times, can even override the implicit causality bias. Our results add to the growing number of studies that show how various discourse dimensions interact in discourse processing.
This work provides evidence that Subject Island violation effects vanish if subject-embedded gaps are made as frequent and pragmatically felicitous as non-island counterpart controls. We argue that Subject Island effects are caused by the fact that subject-embedded gaps are pragmatically unusual – as the informational focus does not usually correspond to a dependant of the subject phrase – and therefore are highly contrary to comprehenders’ expectations about the distribution of filler–gap dependencies (Chaves 2013, Hofmeister, Casasanto & Sag 2013). This not only explains why sentences with subject-embedded gaps often become more acceptable ‘parasitically’, in the presence of a second gap outside the island, but also explains why some Subject Island violations fail to exhibit any amelioration with repetition (Sprouse 2009, Crawford 2011, Goodall 2011); some ameliorate marginally (Snyder 2000, 2017) or moderately (Hiramatsu 2000, Clausen 2011, Chaves & Dery 2014), and others become fully acceptable, as in our case. This conclusion extends to self-paced reading Subject Island studies (Stowe 1986, Kurtzman & Crawford 1991, Pickering, Barton & Shillcock 1994, Phillips 2006), which sometimes find evidence of gap filling and sometimes do not.
0.Introduction One of the tasks required to understand narrative discourse is ordering events described by the sentences in the narrative. Previous research has claimed that at least three factors affect the way the order of events is determined. One of these factors is the "anaphoricity" of tense, which means that the tense of a sentence refers back to the time just after the event described by the previous sentence, or that it refers back to the time at which the state that is described by the previous sentence holds. This view was first proposed by Partee (1973) and further developed in Partee (1984). To illustrate, consider (1).(1) Sheila had a party last Friday and Sam got drunk.Partee argues that most uses of tenses are referential. In the second sentence in (1), the past tense does not refer back to any random time before the time of utterance. Rather, it refers back specifically to the vicinity of the time in which the state that is described by the previous clause holds. This analysis, which posits that tenses refer back to some other time that is given by previous event and state descriptions, is the main gist of models of discourse interpretation that make use of the notion of temporal anaphora. Discourse interpretation models such as Discourse Representation Theory have made use of the notion of temporal anaphora in explaining the temporal relationship of events and states in narrative discourse (Kamp & Reyle 1993). Through temporal anaphoricity, the temporal ordering of events is established.Another possible factor that affects the interpretation of event order is world knowledge. Speakers usually have knowledge of how the world operates and functions; i.e., they know that certain events tend to trigger other events, e.g., an event involving a barking dog may be followed by an event of a running cat. Speakers usually have knowledge of the cause-and-effect relations that hold between different events in real life. Speakers may use this world knowledge to determine the temporal order of events described by sequences of sentences. To illustrate, consider (2) and (3).
The present investigation steps back to the claims of the 1990s by assuming that there is a functional opposition in the use of P- and D-PRO which affects the status of the pronoun's referent in the mental model of the discourse. We interpret the earlier findings as an indication of an information structural difference which is specifically relevant on the discourse level. The question we address here is twofold. Firstly, we ask whether the assumed opposition in the information status of P- and D-PRO referents has consequences on referent continuation in the ongoing discourse. So far, the effects of P- vs. D-PRO use were determined concerning the status of the pronoun referent in the actual sequence of discourse, i.e. they were determined by a judgement on the salience or the topic/focus status of the pronominal DP. As far as we can see, this determination has not been operationalized further. Since there are contexts in which both P- and D-PRO would fit in with only a feeling of a difference but without clear-cut exclusiveness, the opposition is empirically not well validated. If we could show that there are effects of type of pronoun on the ongoing discourse this would, in our view, provide the lacking empirical validation. Secondly, we ask whether there are effects of the narrator's point of view on P- and D-PRO use. The idea behind this question is that the way of information unfolding in discourse depends on the speaker. S/he decides which pieces of information come next, what is foreground and what is background information. If type of pronoun choice is related to the processes of discourse organization by the speaker – via fore- and backgrounding of information – and if internal or external location of the narrator's point of view influences the organization strategies of the speaker/narrator this might have an ffect on the use of P- and D-PRO.
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