Questions Under Discussion: From Sentence to Discourse

Benz, Anton; Jasinskaja, Katja

doi:10.1080/0163853x.2017.1316038

Cited by 32 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…To interpret this reply as an indirect refusal, the child must infer that 'I have a cough' is somehow relevant to the current 'question under discussion' in the conversation and use this to determine the implied meaning (e.g. Benz & Jasinskaja, 2017). For this reason, some theorists have referred to successful interpretation of this type of indirect language as 'relevance inferencing' (Sperber & Wilson, 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How do 3-year-olds use relevance inferencing to interpret indirect speech?

et al. 2021

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If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies, ‘I have a cough’, the requesting child must make a ‘relevance inference’ to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive skills relate to relevance inferencing. In addition, we asked whether children’s lab-based pragmatic performance relates to children’s parent-assessed pragmatic language skills. We tested 3.5- to 4-year-old speakers of British English (Study 1: N = 40, Study 2: N = 32). Children were presented with video-recorded vignettes ending with an utterance requiring a relevance inference, for which children made a forced choice. Study 1 measured children’s Theory of Mind, their sentence comprehension and their real-world knowledge and found that only real-world knowledge retained significance in a regression analysis with children’s relevance inferencing as the outcome variable. Study 2 then manipulated children’s world-knowledge through priming but found this did not improve children’s performance on the relevance inferencing task. Study 2 did, however, reveal a significant correlation between children’s relevance inferencing and a measure of morpho-syntactic production. In both studies parents rated their children’s pragmatic language usage in daily life, which was found to relate to performance in our lab-based relevance inferencing task. This set of studies is the first to empirically demonstrate that lab-based measures of relevance inferencing are reflective of children’s pragmatic abilities ‘in the wild’. There was no clear association between relevance inferencing and Theory of Mind. There was mixed evidence for the role of formal language, which should be further investigated. Finally, real-world knowledge was indeed associated with relevance inferencing but future experimental work is required to test causal relations.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How do 3-year-olds use relevance inferencing to interpret indirect speech?

et al. 2021

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“…A growing body of evidence, however, suggests that comprehenders can use contextual cues to form expectations about specific QUDs that the following discourse should address, and that such expectations can guide the processing of subsequent discourse material Grant, Clifton, & Frazier, 2012;Kehler & Rohde, 2017). Kehler and Rohde (2017), for example, presented participants with sentences 1 While there have been several attempts to integrate the QUD approach with theories based on coherence relations, the work is still in progress (Benz & Jasinskaja, 2017). We are therefore agnostic as to whether QUDs subsume coherence relations or are rather complementary to them.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Discourse Expectations Are Sensitive to the Question Under Discussion: Evidence From ERPs

Delogu

Jachmann

Staudte

et al. 2019

Discourse Processes

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Questions under Discussion (QUDs) have been suggested to influence the integration of individual utterances into a discourse-level representation. Previous work has shown that processing ungrammatical ellipses is facilitated when the elided material addresses an implicit QUD raised through a non-actuality implicature (NAIs; Grant et al., 2013). It is not clear, however, if QUDs influence discourse coherence during comprehension of fully acceptable discourse. We present two ERP studies examining the effects of QUDs introduced by NAIs using two-sentence discourses. Experiment 1 showed that processing definite NPs with inaccessible antecedents is facilitated when their content is relevant to the QUD. Using acceptable discourses, Experiment 2 showed that definite NPs failing to address a QUD elicit increased processing cost. Overall, our results indicate that QUDs raise the expectation that the following discourse will address them, providing unambiguous evidence that their influence is not limited to the processing of ungrammatical input.

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“…QUDs are constructs that help to structure discourse, to determine the relations between sentences within a coherent discourse, and to relate sentence topics with more general discourse topics (cf. Roberts 1996;Benz & Jasinskaja 2017). 3 As such, the current QUD corresponds to an implicit or explicit question that the current utterance is assumed to answer.…”

Section: Previous Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Morphological marking of contrast in Tima

Becker

Schneider-Blum

2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Tima (Niger-Congo, Sudan) has two morphological means to express contrast: focus marking and selective marking. We take the distribution of both marking options and their interaction as evidence for a broad approach to contrast, the latter being a gradient phenomenon rather than a categorical one. We show for Tima that exhaustivity and unexpectedness play a role in determining the strength of the contrast, with the selective marker and focus marker occurring with weaker and stronger types of contrast respectively. While the selective marker signals the existence of a set of alternatives singling out one alternative, the focus marker requires that the information under focus is either exhaustive or unexpected.

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Questions Under Discussion: From Sentence to Discourse

Abstract: The authors of this introduction are given in alphabetical order. Both contributed equally to the preparation of this special issue.

Cited by 32 publications

References 40 publications

How do 3-year-olds use relevance inferencing to interpret indirect speech?

How do 3-year-olds use relevance inferencing to interpret indirect speech?

Discourse Expectations Are Sensitive to the Question Under Discussion: Evidence From ERPs

Morphological marking of contrast in Tima

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