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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]

We present a study of discourse connectives and discourse relations in English parallel texts, i.e. in written and spoken originals, as well as translation and interpreting from German. For this, we apply automatic procedures to annotate discourse connectives and relations they trigger in a parallel corpus. We look at distributions of various connectives and discourse relations, comparing spoken and written mode, as well as original and translated or interpreted language production. Furthermore, we analyse the translation patterns in terms of translation entropy. We link our observations to the phenomena of explicitation and implicitation. We find that in both interpreting and translation, explicitation and implicitation patters are affected by the cognitive complexity of the discourse relation signalled by the connective. Moreover, we also show that the difference in the specificity of the same connectives in interpreting and translation also depends on the type of relation they trigger. [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 learning a second language, some connectives are more difficult to acquire and to master than others. While previous research has assessed different factors responsible for this difficulty by using offline tasks, little is known about the extent to which L2-readers are sensitive to different connectives while reading. In our study, we compared self-paced reading times of native and non-native speakers of French for sentences that were correctly or incorrectly marked with either the infrequent connective cependant ('however') or the more frequent mais ('but'). Results showed that incorrect uses only produced longer reading times when mais was used. Yet, in a sentence-evaluation-task using the same set of sentences, L2-speakers were able to discriminate incorrectly marked sentences with cependant from correctly marked ones. We conclude that a good theoretical understanding of connectives for L2 (Experiment 2) does not always warrant a quick activation of their meaning while reading (Experiment 1). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper describes a rule-based approach and a machine learning approach to disambiguate the discourse usage of Turkish connectives, which not only has single and phrasal connectives as most languages do, but also suffixal connectives that largely correspond to subordinating conjunctions in English. Since these connectives have different linguistic characteristics, two sets of linguistic rules are devised to disambiguate their discourse usage. The linguistic rules are used in the rule-based approach and employed as feature sets in the machine learning approach to test whether they influenced the decision of our algorithms. The results of both approaches are evaluated over the Turkish section of TED-Multilingual Discourse Bank and Turkish Discourse Bank 1.1, two datasets annotated in the Penn Discourse TreeBank style. The paper attests to the predictive power of the linguistic rules in disambiguating the discourse usage of both types of connectives also offering new knowledge and insights for discourse processing from the view of a morphologically rich language. [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]

Connectives such as however and since play an important role for marking coherence relations in discourse and therefore are crucial for reading comprehension, which in turn is a strong predictor of academic success. Most research on the acquisition of connectives targeted younger children. Yet there is evidence that connective development extends well into adolescence and even adult speakers have difficulties with some coherence relations when they are conveyed by infrequent connectives bound to the written mode. In this paper, we tested the use of connectives encoding different coherence relations and bound to either the oral or the written modes. We studied the performance of native French-speaking teenagers (N  = 154, M age = 14.43, range: 12–19) in a cloze task and also assessed whether teenagers' vocabulary level and degree of exposure to print predicted the accuracy of connective use. Our findings show that the ability to use connectives appropriately increases with age. However, age played a lesser role compared to vocabulary knowledge and degree of exposure to print, thus indicating that lexicon size and reading habits are important factors explaining individual differences in the acquisition of connectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the emergence of the Chinese adverb běnlái and its further development into a stance discourse marker (sdm). Most previous studies consider the epistemic modal adverb běnlái ('indeed, truly') to have originated from the temporal adverb běnlái ('originally'). Based on the framework of constructionalisation (Traugott and Trousdale 2013) and Van de Velde et al.'s (2013) idea of multiple sources, I argue that the temporal adverb might not have been the only source for the modal běnlái to occur. Furthermore, the modal adverb changed into an sdm, thereby signaling the speaker's subjective evaluation while linking the coherence of the discourse. I argue that the change was enabled by both subjectification and analogisation. The exemplars to which běnlái was by hypothesis analogised include the extant discourse connectives (e.g., kěshì) and the extant commentary pragmatic markers (e.g., kělián and suǒxìng) (Fraser 2009). [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]

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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 presents dependency profiles (DPs) as an empirical method to investigate linguistic elements and their application to the study of 24 discourse connectives in the 3.7-billion token Finnish Internet Parsebank (http://bionlp-www.utu.fi/dep%5fsearch/). DPs are based on co-occurrence patterns of the discourse connectives with dependency syntax relations. They follow the assumption of usage-based models, according to which the semantic and functional properties of linguistic expressions arise based on their distributional characteristics. We focus on the typical usage patterns reflected by the DPs and the (dis)similarities among discourse connectives that these patterns reveal. We demonstrate that 1) DPs can be analyzed with clustering to obtain linguistically meaningful groupings among the connectives and that 2) the clustering can be combined with support vector machines to obtain generic and stable linguistic characteristics of the discourse connectives. We show that this data-driven method offers support for previous results and reveals novel tendencies outside the scope of studies on smaller corpora. As the method is based on automatic syntactic analysis following the cross-linguistic universal dependencies, it does not require manual annotation and can be applied to a number of languages and in contrastive studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we show how three often used and seemingly different discourse annotation frameworks – Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), and Segmented Discourse Representation Theory – can be related by using a set of unifying dimensions. These dimensions are taken from the Cognitive approach to Coherence Relations and combined with more fine-grained additional features from the frameworks themselves to yield a posited set of dimensions that can successfully map three frameworks. The resulting interface will allow researchers to find identical or at least closely related relations within sets of annotated corpora, even if they are annotated within different frameworks. Furthermore, we tested our unified dimension (UniDim) approach by comparing PDTB and RST annotations of identical newspaper texts and converting their original end label annotations of relations into the accompanying values per dimension. Subsequently, rates of overlap in the attributed values per dimension were analyzed. Results indicate that the proposed dimensions indeed create an interface that makes existing annotation systems "talk to each other." [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]

While there is a substantial amount of evidence for language processing being a highly incremental and predictive process, we still know relatively little about how top-down discourse based expectations are combined with bottom-up information such as discourse connectives. The present article reports on three experiments investigating this question using different methodologies (visual world paradigm and ERPs) in two languages (German and English). We find support for highly incremental processing of causal and concessive discourse connectives, causing anticipation of upcoming material. Our visual world study shows that anticipatory looks depend on the discourse connective; furthermore, the German ERP study revealed an N400 effect on a gender-marked adjective preceding the target noun, when the target noun was inconsistent with the expectations elicited by the combination of context and discourse connective. Moreover, our experiments reveal that the facilitation of downstream material based on earlier connectives comes at the cost of reversing original expectations, as evidenced by a P600 effect on the concessive relative to the causal connective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multilingual children are faced with the task of selectively using the linguistic systems of their languages. Previous research has shown that although bilinguals may make more errors in production and comprehension than their monolingual peers, less cognitively demanding processing experiments may reveal target-like performance. This has been attributed to several factors, among which language transfer and processing limitations. In this study we investigate the processing of additive connectives in both languages of German–Russian bilingual children using the Visual World Paradigm. Previous research has shown that bilingual children make many errors in the production of these connectives in Russian. The results show that the processing behaviour in both languages of the bilingual children does not differ from that of their monolingual peers. This finding is compatible with the view that errors in production and in more demanding comprehension tasks are due to processing limitations. [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.

Discourse connectives are lexical items indicating coherence relations between discourse segments. Even though many languages possess a whole range of connectives, important divergences exist cross-linguistically in the number of connectives that are used to express a given relation. For this reason, connectives are not easily paired with a univocal translation equivalent across languages. This paper is a first attempt to design a reliable method to annotate the meaning of discourse connectives cross-linguistically using corpus data. We present the methodological choices made to reach this aim and report three annotation experiments using the framework of the Penn Discourse Tree Bank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the relevance approach, discourse connectives (DC) are procedural markers that explicitly guide the reader to achieve relevance. Thus, DCs instruct readers or hearers to follow an inferential route by combining linguistic content and accessible contextual assumptions in order to recover the intended semantic relation between two discourse segments. The procedural nature of DCs can pose a challenge in discourse comprehension. First, their lack of conceptual content can make it difficult for language learners to access their meaning. Second, since each discourse connective encodes a unique procedure, DCs that fall under the same category cannot be used interchangeably. With a focus on the discourse connective fa, this article aims to bridge the gap between linguistic theory and classroom practice by drawing attention to the importance of DCs in facilitating discourse comprehension. A procedural analysis of fa and pedagogical model rooted in relevance theory and informed from the ACTFL three- phase performance assessment are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]