Effects of discourse on control

Abstract

This study examined discourse effects on obligatory and non-obligatory control interpretations. Seventy participants undertook three online forced-choice surveys, which monitored preferred interpretations in complement control, verbal gerund subject control, long-distance control and sentence-final temporal adjunct control. Survey 1 ascertained their baseline interpretations of the empty category in these constructions. Survey 2 primed the critical sentences used in survey 1 with a weakly established topic of discourse and survey 3 primed them with a strongly established one. Reference assignment in complement control remained consistent across all three conditions, illustrating that pragmatics does not infiltrate this structurally regulated and syntactically unambiguous construction. Changes in interpretation were found in the remaining three constructions. An accessibility-motivated scale of influence, combining three independent discourse factors (topichood, competition and linear distance) was created to model reference determination in verbal gerund subject control and long-distance control. The results for temporal adjunct control are novel. They revealed a much stronger susceptibility to pragmatic interference than that reported in the literature yet the construction behaved differently from non-obligatory control under discourse pressure. We propose a structural account for sentence-final temporal adjunct control, which permits the evident interpretation shift while still excluding arbitrary and sentence-external interpretations.

Contrasting Complement Control, Temporal Adjunct Control and Controlled Verbal Gerund Subjects in ASD: The Role of Contextual Cues in Reference Assignment

“…More recently, Janke (2016) demonstrated that children aged between 6;9 and 11;3 do in fact permit object interpretations when that object is cued by a strongly established topic. The same result was found in a comparable study on 70 adults (Janke and Bailey, 2017). They did not, however, accept external-referent interpretations under the same amount of discourse pressure.…”

“…However, there is another reason for this construction being an interesting topic to examine in children with autism, which relates to work that has revealed a lenience it exhibits in terms of the interpretations its ec permits. Recent experimental work on this sub-type of adjunct control has indicated that children's and adults' interpretations of the ec are not quite as previously assumed in the literature (see Janke, 2016, for children and Janke and Bailey, 2017, for adults). Using the aforementioned pragmatic lead paradigm, participants were asked to make referent-choice decisions in different sub-types of control which were preceded by no contextual cue, a weak contextual cue or a strong contextual cue.…”

“…In the controlled verbal-gerund subject (VGS) below, which we met first in (2) above, the agent of the verb could be the sentential argument or someone else, although in the absence of context, the sentential argument is the preferred choice of most child and adult speakers (see Janke, 2016; Janke and Bailey, 2017 respectively). The fact that this example also permits an external-referent reading demonstrates the absence of the syntactic restrictions we saw for complement and sentence-final temporal adjunct control above.…”

“…However, this is not fixed, as evidenced by the manner in which our interpretations can change in (8b and c). (8b) provides a “weakly established topic,” in that the introductory sentence promises to make Ron the topic of the forthcoming sentence (see Janke and Bailey, 2017). The ec in the following sentence is a discourse-anaphoric element so it can take its reference from this weakly established topic.…”

“…On the basis of these results, Janke and Bailey (2017) presented an analysis for this type of sentence-final adjunct control which could reflect these seemingly conflicting properties: Unlike complement control, which remains resilient to pragmatic cues, pragmatic cues preceding temporal adjunct control result in a significant number of children and adults adopting object interpretations. This generally only occurs under severe strong discourse pressure and not all participants are persuaded by the cue 2 .…”