Stepping back to look ahead: neuter encapsulation and referent extension in counter-argumentative and causal relations in Spanish

Abstract

In discourse comprehension, if all goes well, people tend to create a rich and coherent mental representation of the events described in the text. To do so, referential and relational coherence must be established in order to construct a connected discourse. The objective of this follow-up eye-tracking study (N = 72) is to explore the existence of an interaction effect between two factors: (a) the extension of the referent (short and long antecedent), and (b) the semantic relation (counter-argumentativea pesar de, and causalpor), when processing the neuter pronounelloin texts written in Spanish. No previous study has systematically compared the on-line processing of texts in which different extensions of the encapsulated anaphoric antecedent by the neuter pronounello(‘this’ or ‘it’ in English) are presented in diverse marked semantic relations (causal and counter-argumentative). Based on three eye-tracking measures, we found distinctive patterns of reading behavior when anaphoric neuter reference and semantic relations must be processed conjointly in order to construct a coherent mental representation. The main findings show that reading longer and more complex antecedents encapsulated by the neutral pronounselloexerts more cognitive effort in late processing (Look Back measure), particularly when simultaneously and in the same discourse construction there is an explicitly marked counter-argumentative semantic relation. Implications for theories of referential and relational coherence are discussed.

A sequence labelling approach for automatic analysis of ello: tagging pronouns, antecedents, and connective phrases

“…Neuter pronouns such as ello that encapsulate one or two clauses and that refer to abstract entities in complex nominalisations require longer reading times and exert reinspections of the possible target antecedents, exploiting more strategic and delayed processes [37]. The psycholinguistic requirements imposed by a neuter pronoun ello when it refers to a long antecedent and, at the same time, com bines with a connective phrase to form a complex discourse marker expressing a counter-argumentative semantic relation are more demanding than when the pronoun is linked to a short antecedent and combines with a connective phrase expressing a causal relation [38]. This is the first study presenting an automatic method to identify, for each occurrence of the pronoun ello in naturally occurring Spanish texts, the antecedent of the pronoun, the syntactic type of antecedent, the connec tive phrase which is combined with the pronoun to form a complex discourse marker linking the antecedent to the subsequent text segment, and the se mantic relation expressed by the discourse marker.…”

“…Encapsulation is a text mechanism of cohesion and coherence through which the meaning of textual segments is condensed or labelled, establishing a pro cess of reference and substitution by another textual element, such as pro nouns and nouns [18,1,2,15]. Encapsulators contribute to textual thematic progression and to referential maintenance by connecting pieces of discourse and helping to construct the coherence of the text [37,38]. In this way, they are fundamental links that also guide comprehension by converting the en capsulated information into shared knowledge available to the reader [9,40,51,47].…”