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Psycholinguistic literature has consistently shown that humans rely on a rich and organized understanding of event knowledge to predict the forthcoming linguistic input during online sentence comprehension. We, the authors, expect sentences to maintain coherence with the preceding context, making congruent sentence sequences easier to process than incongruent ones. It is widely known that discourse relations between sentences (e.g., temporal, contingency, comparison) are generally made explicit through specific particles, known as discourse connectives, (e.g., and, but, because, after). However, some relations that are easily accessible to the speakers, given their event knowledge, can also be left implicit. The goal of this paper is to investigate the importance of discourse connectives in the prediction of events in human language processing and pretrained language models, with a specific focus on concessives and contrastives, which signal to comprehenders that their event-related predictions have to be reversed. Inspired by previous work, we built a comprehensive set of story stimuli in Italian and Mandarin Chinese that differ in the plausibility and coherence of the situation being described and the presence or absence of a discourse connective. We collected plausibility judgments and reading times from native speakers for the stimuli. Moreover, we correlated the results of the experiments with the predictions given by computational modeling, using Surprisal scores obtained via Transformer-based language models. The human judgements were collected using a seven-point Likert scale and analyzed using cumulative link mixed modeling (CLMM), while the human reading times and language model surprisal scores were analyzed using linear mixed effects regression (LMER). We found that Chinese NLMs are sensitive to plausibility and connectives, although they struggle to reproduce expectation reversal effects due to a connective changing the plausibility of a given scenario; Italian results are even less aligned with human data, with no effects of either plausibility and connectives on Surprisal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psycholinguistic literature has consistently shown that humans rely on a rich and organized understanding of event knowledge to predict the forthcoming linguistic input during online sentence comprehension. We, the authors, expect sentences to maintain coherence with the preceding context, making congruent sentence sequences easier to process than incongruent ones. It is widely known that discourse relations between sentences (e.g., temporal, contingency, comparison) are generally made explicit through specific particles, known as discourse connectives, (e.g., and, but, because, after). However, some relations that are easily accessible to the speakers, given their event knowledge, can also be left implicit. The goal of this paper is to investigate the importance of discourse connectives in the prediction of events in human language processing and pretrained language models, with a specific focus on concessives and contrastives, which signal to comprehenders that their event-related predictions have to be reversed. Inspired by previous work, we built a comprehensive set of story stimuli in Italian and Mandarin Chinese that differ in the plausibility and coherence of the situation being described and the presence or absence of a discourse connective. We collected plausibility judgments and reading times from native speakers for the stimuli. Moreover, we correlated the results of the experiments with the predictions given by computational modeling, using Surprisal scores obtained via Transformer-based language models. The human judgements were collected using a seven-point Likert scale and analyzed using cumulative link mixed modeling (CLMM), while the human reading times and language model surprisal scores were analyzed using linear mixed effects regression (LMER). We found that Chinese NLMs are sensitive to plausibility and connectives, although they struggle to reproduce expectation reversal effects due to a connective changing the plausibility of a given scenario; Italian results are even less aligned with human data, with no effects of either plausibility and connectives on Surprisal.

When writing a text, the choice between seemingly equivalent connectives, such as but and however, is not arbitrary: aside from preferences linked to the register or modality of the utterance, there are often pragmatic or syntactic constraints that limit the choice to only one particular connective. For French, theoretical approaches have extensively discussed the syntactic and pragmatic constraints that allow only either parce que ('because') or puisque ('since'). However, experimental findings regarding the actual sensitivity of French speakers to these constraints remain inconclusive. In the current study, we examine the sensitivity of different speaker groups to the constraints associated with the use of parce que and puisque. In a controlled offline-task, we systematically evaluate the sensitivity of a crowd-sourced heterogeneous group of native speakers (Experiment 1) and a group of non-native speakers (Experiment 2). Results show that native speakers are more sensitive to syntactic constraints whereas pragmatic constraints are more equivocal. Non-native speakers, however, are not sensitive to either of these constraints. In addition, the pragmatically complex connective puisque is extremely problematic for non-native speakers, as even the mapping of a seemingly equivalent connective of their L1 did not warrant a good mastery of its pragmatic functions. • Native speakers are more sensitive to syntactic constraints than to pragmatic ones. • The pragmatically complex connective puisque ('since') appears extremely difficult to master for non-native speakers. • A correct metalinguistic understanding about puisque facilitates its mastery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The single biggest obstacle in performing comprehensive cross-lingual discourse analysis is the scarcity of multilingual resources. The existing resources are overwhelmingly monolingual, compelling researchers to infer the discourse-level information in the target languages through error-prone automatic means. The current paper aims to provide a more direct insight into the cross-lingual variations in discourse structures by linking the annotated relations of the TED-Multilingual Discourse Bank, which consists of independently annotated six TED talks in seven different languages. It is shown that the linguistic labels over the relations annotated in the texts of these languages can be automatically linked with English with high accuracy, as verified against the relations of three diverse languages semi-automatically linked with relations over English texts. The resulting corpus has a great potential to reveal the divergences in local discourse relations, as well as leading to new resources, as exemplified by the induction of bilingual discourse connective lexicons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In English and Vietnamese, demonstratives are considered one of the most important linguistic items for their ability to enhance writing coherence. Crucial as they are, few investigations have been conducted to analyze the differences in their uses in English and Vietnamese written discourse. This research attempts to investigate the differences in the use of Vietnamese demonstratives and English demonstratives in model Vietnamese (MV) and model American English (MA) argumentative essays. Adopting both quantitative and qualitative analyses, it focuses on the frequency and pragmatic uses of proximal and distal demonstratives in the two languages. It was discovered that English essays had significantly more proximal and cataphoric uses of demonstratives than Vietnamese essays. While English proximal demonstratives this(these) indicated topic shifting and distal demonstratives that(those) signaled topic continuity, a contrary pattern was observed in Vietnamese. Moreover, in investigating the referential uses of demonstratives, it was revealed that the use of Vietnamese demonstratives differed from English in the sense that they could act as discourse connectives facilitating the interpretation process of the readers. The study's results contribute to the cross-language analysis and comparison of demonstratives and provide implications for the teaching of English demonstratives in academic writing in Vietnam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rational accounts of language use such as the uniform information density hypothesis, which asserts that speakers distribute information uniformly across their utterances, and the rational speech act (RSA) model, which suggests that speakers optimize the formulation of their message by reasoning about what the comprehender would understand, have been hypothesized to account for a wide range of language use phenomena. We here specifically focus on the production of discourse connectives. While there is some prior work indicating that discourse connective production may be governed by RSA, that work uses a strongly gamified experimental setting. In this study, we aim to explore whether speakers reason about the interpretation of their conversational partner also in more realistic settings. We thereby systematically vary the task setup to tease apart effects of task instructions and effects of the speaker explicitly seeing the interpretation alternatives for the listener. Our results show that the RSA-predicted effect of connective choice based on reasoning about the listener is only found in the original setting where explicit interpretation alternatives of the listener are available for the speaker. The effect disappears when the speaker has to reason about listener interpretations. We furthermore find that rational effects are amplified by the gamified task setting, indicating that meta-reasoning about the specific task may play an important role and potentially limit the generalizability of the found effects to more naturalistic every-day language use.

Rational accounts of language use such as the uniform information density hypothesis, which asserts that speakers distribute information uniformly across their utterances, and the rational speech act (RSA) model, which suggests that speakers optimize the formulation of their message by reasoning about what the comprehender would understand, have been hypothesized to account for a wide range of language use phenomena. We here specifically focus on the production of discourse connectives. While there is some prior work indicating that discourse connective production may be governed by RSA, that work uses a strongly gamified experimental setting. In this study, we aim to explore whether speakers reason about the interpretation of their conversational partner also in more realistic settings. We thereby systematically vary the task setup to tease apart effects of task instructions and effects of the speaker explicitly seeing the interpretation alternatives for the listener. Our results show that the RSA-predicted effect of connective choice based on reasoning about the listener is only found in the original setting where explicit interpretation alternatives of the listener are available for the speaker. The effect disappears when the speaker has to reason about listener interpretations. We furthermore find that rational effects are amplified by the gamified task setting, indicating that meta-reasoning about the specific task may play an important role and potentially limit the generalizability of the found effects to more naturalistic every-day language use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is aimed at making a cross-linguistic analysis of explicit and implicit means of verbalization of epistemic causal relations in German and Kazakh. It provides an overview of similarities and differences of causal connectives in two typologically different languages: German and Kazakh. This study proves the linguistic reliability of the subject involvement scale. Causal relations and their segments reflecting the speaker’s assumptions and actions may influence the degree of subject involvement. In the present paper we made an attempt to define the principal types of information that determine epistemic conditions since they contribute greatly to the development of cognitive-pragmatic functions in the discourse. An epistemic causal relation expresses the degree of the speaker’s knowledge of the objective situation and his/her beliefs, assumptions, and attitudes to objective reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a tangible outcome of the TextLink network: a joint online database project displaying and linking existing and newly-created lexicons of discourse connectives in multiple languages. We discuss the definition and demarcation of the class of connectives that should be included in such a resource, and present the syntactic, semantic/pragmatic, and lexicographic information we collected. Further, the technical implementation of the database and the search functionality are presented. We discuss how the multilingual integration of several connective lexicons provides added value for linguistic researchers and other users interested in connectives, by allowing crosslinguistic comparison and a direct linking between discourse relational devices in different languages. Finally, we provide pointers for possible future extensions both in breadth (i.e., by adding lexicons for additional languages) and depth (by extending the information provided for each connective item and by strengthening the crosslinguistic links).

Abstract A straw man is a form of fallacious argument that involves the distortion of an opponent's view in order to make it more extreme and therefore less acceptable, thus easier to attack. In three experiments, we assess linguistic factors that may influence the acceptability of straw men for addressees. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that a straw man is more acceptable when the speaker's argument is attacked rather than his standpoint. In Experiment 2, we show that a straw man is more acceptable when it contains two arguments that are simply juxtaposed rather than linked by a causal connective indicating attributed content (i.e. the French puisque). In Experiment 3, we find that a straw man is more acceptable when it echoes the speaker's explicit rather than implicit meaning. Taken together, these experiments strongly indicate that the formulation of a straw man has an impact on its perceived acceptability. Our results thus open a new avenue of inquiry for studies assessing the role of linguistic factors on the acceptability of fallacies. Highlights • Experimental studies of linguistic factors influencing the straw man fallacy. • Evidence for the role of connectives in argumentative context. • Discusses difference between implicit and explicit echoes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though the mastery of discourse connectives represents an important step toward reaching high language proficiency, it remains highly difficult for L2-learners to master them. We conducted an experiment in which we tested the mastery of 12 monofunctional French connectives conveying six different coherence relations by 151 German-speaking learners of French, as well as a control group of 63 native French speakers. Our results show that the cognitive complexity of the coherence relation and connectives’ frequency, both found to be important factors for native speakers’ connective mastery, play a minor role for the mastery by non-native speakers. Instead, we argue that two specific factors, namely the connectives’ register and meaning transparency, seem to be more predictive variables. In addition, we found that a higher exposure to print in L1, correlates with a better mastery of the connectives in L2. We discuss the implications of our findings in the context of second language acquisition.

In this paper, we explore the linguistic factors that influence an author's choice of discourse connectives in the production of a coherent text. We focus on the competition between so-called primary connectives (grammaticalized and mostly one-word expressions such as therefore ) and secondary connectives (not yet fully grammaticalized compositional discourse phrases such as for this reason ). We attempt to describe the linguistic constraints on and preferences in connective selection. The analysis is based on manually annotated data from the Prague Discourse Treebank 2.0 (PDiT), which contains almost 50000 sentences from Czech newspaper texts. We demonstrate that discourse connectives are used in accordance with the economy principle in language, i.e. authors aim to achieve the maximal result with minimal effort. They most frequently choose short and semantically more generalized primary connectives. However, in cases where the discourse relations can be misunderstood, authors prefer more complex and specific structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a contrastive analysis of the distribution and interpretation of the French adverbs or and maintenant and the Italian adverb ora. Our goal is to describe the parallelism between the temporal and argumentative use of these three adverbs, and to underline at the same time the differences in the use of ora with respect to or / maintenant. We claim that ora and or / maintenant share a common function, which is to update the point of perspective in the temporal structure of the ongoing discourse. Next, we propose that the semantic feature that justifies this updating function is the essential link between the temporal reading and the epistemic reading, which can be considered as the typical result of a process of abstraction of temporal adverbs into discourse connectives.

Discourse connectives are often reported to be difficult for second language learners, yet the causes of these difficulties are still not fully understood. In this paper, we test the ability of German-speaking learners to process and understand a connective with a complex form-function mapping in their L2-French, namely “en effet,” a connective that does not have an exact translation equivalent in their L1-German. We assess learners' competence both in an on-line processing experiment and an off-line judgment task. We argue that one of the interesting specificities of “en effet” is that the two coherence relations that it conveys cannot equally be conveyed implicitly. This case study therefore provides some information about advanced learners' sensitivity to the necessity of explicitly marking a coherence relation by the use of a connective. Our results indicate that advanced learners do not perceive the difference between relations that need and need not be marked by a discourse connective and have not acquired the complex form-function mapping of “en effet.” We argue that these difficulties cannot be attributed to negative transfer effects, but reflect general limitations in proficiency.

This paper presents the identification of discourse connectives in the “French Treebank” corpus (FTB) already annotated for morpho-syntax. This is the first step in the full discursive annotation of this corpus. The method consists in projecting on the corpus the items that are listed in LexConn, a lexicon of French connectives, and then filtering the occurrences of these elements that do not have a discursive use, but for example are used as an adverb of manner or a preposition introducing a subcategorized complement. More than 10K connectives have been identified.

Discourse relations in natural languages link clauses in text and compose overall text structure. Discourse connectives are an important part of modeling the Malayalam discourse structure. We followed the annotation procedure of Penn Discourse Tree Bank and worked on tagging of discourse connectives and arguments of Malayalam text and also report the senses of relation. We present our work on annotations of Malayalam discourse connectives and arguments which helps to know more about the discourse connectives and their appearance in case of semantic rules in Malayalam discourse. Discourse connectives may or may not be explicitly present in the relation. In our work, we focus on the annotation of both explicit and implicit connectives and arguments in Malayalam text and showed encouraging results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A morphemic-indicational description of English but (and French mais) is proposed, showing that the uses of but whose closer equivalents (and French translation) are almost, except, only, and without, together with the considerable variety of its connective uses, may be accounted for within a single semantic description. It is shown that but and mais do not encode metacommunicational indications about the relationship between the connected utterances, as is commonly believed and asserted, but provide a rather aspectual information/indication, whose interpretation is contextual and constructional. It is hence shown that but and mais's description should be split into levels: the description of the indication encoded by the morpheme, which is active in all its uses, and the description of the constructional interpretation the indication receives when the morpheme is inserted in a given construction - such as But for X, Y or P but Q- or used in a specific context. The efficiency of this description is shown to support the Indicational-Indexical Semantics - IIS - framework approach. An introduction to this framework and to its relationship with the instructional semantics mainstream on the one hand, and with the procedural/conceptual distinction on the other hand, is also proposed.

Highlights: [•] The hypothesis that connectives can introduce given information is empirically tested. [•] The segment introduced by puisque is read faster when it introduces ‘given’ than ‘new’ information. [•] Parce que is judged to be less acceptable than puisque to convey ‘given’ information. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

With respect to discourse organization, the most basic way of signaling the speaker’s or writer’s intentions is to use explicit lexical markers: so-called discourse markers or discourse connectives. While a lexicon of discourse connectives associated with the relations they express can be very useful for researchers, especially in Natural Language Processing, few projects aim at collecting them exhaustively, and only in a small number of languages. We present LEXCONN, a French lexicon of 328 discourse connectives, collected with their syntactic categories and the discourse relations they convey, and the methodology followed to build this resource. The lexicon has been constructed manually, applying systematic connective and relation identification criteria, using the FRANTEXT corpus as empirical support. Each connective has been associated to a relation within the framework of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. We make a case for a few refinements in the theory, based on cases where no existing relation seemed to match a connective’s usage.

Abstract: The English discourse marker now has been characterized as a marker of “temporal relations between utterances in a discourse” () and as a “coherence marker” (). These and similar formulations are founded on the notion that discourse markers primarily serve functions related to local discourse coherence. In the present paper, drawing on relevance theory (), I argue that it is preferable to formulate the meaning of the marker now without reference to coherence or discourse structure. Two possible relevance-theoretic proposals are considered, one (corresponding roughly to a proposal by ) in which now contributes to the development of a higher-level explicature, and one in which now encodes a procedural constraint on context selection. It is argued that the latter proposal has several advantages over the former and is more comprehensive and unified than existing coherence-based formulations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: As multi-functional devices, discourse connectives have provided fertile ground for language researchers, regardless of theoretical orientation, methodological approach or context of analysis. This study investigates the use of selected discourse connectives in texts produced by companies for purposes of financial disclosure, representing a vital component of corporate communication. The analysis is based on two specially designed corpora of financial disclosure genres mediated by Information and Communication Technology (ICT): earnings presentations, i.e., oral presentations of financial results given by company executives to investment analysts via teleconferencing, and earnings releases, i.e., the written counterpart published on the Internet. Text analysis software was used to generate the quantitative profile of the discourse connectives, while follow-up qualitative analysis in the context of usage provided additional interpretive insights. Overall, the discourse connectives were found to be more frequent in the earnings presentations as compared to the earnings releases, even if they are more typically associated with written prose. Across both corpora, discourse connectives served a range of functions, often foregrounding the positive while attenuating the negative. These findings shed light on the pragmatic uses of discourse connectives by corporate speakers and writers as a way to influence the interpretation of the message, and thus succeed in achieving their professional aims. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Several authors have proposed to describe the meaning and use of causality markers with reference to conceptual models of causality. If a parallel between semantic categories and conceptual categories exists, we would expect that similar conceptual models of causality are manifest across different types of linguistic constructions expressing causality. This cross-level similarity hypothesis is investigated in the present paper. So far, causality markers of different grammatical types have typically been studied in isolation. We argue that for a full understanding of the interaction between conceptual structure and linguistic structure, an integrative perspective on different types of causality markers is needed. We focus on causal verbs (manifest on the clausal level of the linguistic structure) and causal connectives (discourse level) in Dutch. Pursuing the research strategy of converging evidence, we first present theoretical considerations, and subsequently discuss data from language use suggesting that cross-level parallels exist at an analytical level. Then, we report an experiment that aimed to test language users’ intuitions on the cross-level similarity hypothesis. The results are interpreted as empirical evidence for the parallels in meaning of causal verbs and discourse connectives. Remaining challenges for experimental studies of language users’ intuitions are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper shows that although the discourse connectives dakara and sorede have both been analyzed as encoding a cause–consequence relationship, they are not always interchangeable. I re-assess these expressions from a relevance-theoretic perspective, in particular, in light of the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning (Blakemore, 2002). Following Blakemore (2002), I argue that the analysis of these expressions in terms of their role in constraining the recovery of cognitive effects cannot in itself explain the subtle differences between their various interpretations, since they are all tied to the same cognitive effect. I show that the differences between these expressions must be explained in terms of the particular constraints they impose on the contexts in which the utterances containing them are interpreted. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper surveys work on applying the insights of lexicalized grammars to low-level discourse, to show the value of positing an autonomous grammar for low-level discourse in which words (or idiomatic phrases) are associated with discourse-level predicate–argument structures or modification structures that convey their syntactic-semantic meaning and scope. It starts by describing a lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar for discourse (D-LTAG). It then reviews an initial experiment in parsing text automatically, using both a lexicalized TAG and D-LTAG, and then touches upon issues involved in how lexico-syntactic elements contribute to discourse semantics. The paper concludes with a brief description of the Penn Discourse TreeBank, a resource being developed for the study of discourse structure and semantics. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]