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The extent to which gender neutral and gendered nouns impact differently upon native French speakers’ gender representations was examined through a yes-no forced choice task. Swiss (Experiment 1) and Québec (Experiment 2) French-speaking participants were presented with word pairs composed of a gendered first name (e.g., Thomas) and a role (e.g., doctor), and tasked to indicate whether they believed that [first name] could be one of the [role]. Roles varied according to gender stereotypicality (feminine, masculine, non-stereotyped), and were either in a plural masculine (interpretable as generic) or gender neutral (epicenes and group nouns) form. The results indicated that the use of gender neutral forms of roles avoided a strong male bias found for the masculine forms, and that both gender neutral and masculine forms used equal cognitive resources. Further, stereotype effects associated with both gender-neutral and grammatically masculine forms were quite small (

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. Nonnative 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.

Coherence relations are expressed differently across languages, often leading to language learners misusing discourse connectives. We argue that the ability to detect these errors crucially depends on the coherence relation under scrutiny, as errors may remain unnoticed when the relation is clause-internal and marked with a highly optional connective. We focus, therefore, on specifications, a relation that German-speaking learners sometimes struggle to correctly indicate when writing in French. We assessed whether non-native readers detect this error and show preferences for either explicit or implicit marking of specifications. Findings show that non-native speakers were generally able to detect the error in a sentence-evaluation task but did not react to it in a self-paced-reading task, contrary to native speakers. They also judged implicit specifications as more correct than explicitly marked specifications. We conclude that non-native speakers do not always benefit from connectives during text processing, especially when they are highly optional.

While the role of discourse connectives has long been acknowledged in argumentative frameworks, these approaches often take a coarse-grained approach to connectives, treating them as a unified group having similar effects on argumentation. Based on an empirical study of the straw man fallacy, we argue that a more fine-grained approach is needed to explain the role of each connective and illustrate their specificities. We first present an original corpus study detailing the main features of four causal connectives in French that speakers routinely use to attribute meaning to another speaker (puisque, étant donné que, vu que and comme), which is a key element of straw man fallacies. We then assess the influence of each of these connectives in a series of controlled experiments. Our results indicate each connective has different effects for the persuasiveness of straw man fallacies, and that these effects can be explained by differences in their semantic profile, as evidenced in our corpus study. Taken together, our results demonstrate that connectives are important for argumentation but should be analyzed individually, and that the study of fallacies should include a fine-grained analysis of the linguistic elements typically used in their formulation.

Understanding discourse connectives is an important step to achieving effective verbal communication. Yet, the ability of adult native speakers to understand the broad range of connectives ...

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.

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.”

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.

The recent emergence of large parallel corpora has represented a leap ahead for cross-linguistic and translation studies. However, the specificities of these corpora and their influence on the nature of observed linguistic phenomena remain underexplored, especially in the field of contrastive linguistics. In this study, we compare the translation equivalences of four concessive adverbial connectives in English and in French across three corpora varying along three dimensions: register, directionality of the translation and translator expertise. Our results indicate that these dimensions affect the cross-linguistic equivalences observed between connectives. We conclude that, in future work, translation-based claims about cross-linguistic equivalences should be balanced according to the type of data analysed. We also identify a pressing need for more rigorously-documented parallel corpora for the English-French language pair.

Psycholinguistic investigations of the way readers and speakers perceive gender have shown several biases associated with how gender is linguistically realized in language. Although such variations across languages offer interesting grounds for legitimate cross- linguistic comparisons, pertinent characteristics of grammatical systems – especially in terms of their gender asymmetries – have to be clearly identified. In this paper, we present a language index for researchers interested in the effect of grammatical gender on the mental representations of women and men. Our index is based on five main language groups (i.e., grammatical gender languages, languages with a combination of grammatical gender and natural gender, natural gender languages, genderless languages with few traces of grammatical gender and genderless languages) and three sets of specific features (morphology, masculine- male generics and asymmetries). Our index goes beyond existing ones in that it provides specific dimensions relevant to those interested in psychological and sociological impacts of language on the way we perceive women and men. We also offer a critical discussion of any endeavor to classify languages according to grammatical gender.

Coherence relations linking discourse segments can be communicated explicitly by the use of connectives but also implicitly through juxtaposition. Some discourse relations appear, however, to be more coherent than others when conveyed implicitly. This difference is explained in the literature by the existence of default expectations guiding discourse interpretation. In this paper, we assess the factors influencing implicitation by comparing the number of implicit and explicit translations of three polysemous French connectives in translated texts across three target languages: German, English and Spanish. Each connective can convey two discourse relations: one that can easily be conveyed implicitly and one that cannot be easily conveyed implicitly in monolingual data. Results indicate that relations that can easily be conveyed implicitly are also those that are most often left implicit in translation in all target languages. We discuss these results in view of the cognitive factors influencing the explicit or implicit communication of discourse relations.

Connectives are complex lexical items for children, who do not even master connectives used frequently in speech until the end of their primary school years. In this paper, we assess the ability of two groups of 16-year-olds from two different academic levels (i.e., high school vs. professional school students), as well as a group of university students, to use four French connectives bound to the written mode in a constrained production task. These connectives were chosen to assess three potential sources of difficulties: the cognitive complexity of the encoded discourse relation, the connectives’ frequency in corpus data, and their mono- or polyfunctional nature. Our results indicate that teenagers have a lower ability to use these connectives compared to university students, and frequency appears to be the best-suited factor to account for their difficulties. In addition, the teenage group with a higher academic level reached better accuracy with the two more frequent connectives tested. Taken together, our results indicate that teenagers do not yet have mastery over the wide array of connectives from the written mode in their native language, particularly those that are less frequent in corpus data. These connectives are especially problematic for teenagers with a lower academic background.

Previous research has suggested that some discourse relations are easier to convey implicitly than others due to cognitive biases in the interpretation of discourse. In this article we argue that relations involving a perspective shift, such as confirmation relations, are difficult to convey implicitly. We assess this claim with two empirical studies involving the ambiguous French connective en effet, which can either convey a causal relation or a confirmation relation. First, we compare the processing of implicit and explicit causal and confirmation relations conveyed by this connective in a self-paced reading experiment and show that removing the connective in confirmation relations disturbs processing. Second, we compare the percentage of implicit translations of en effet for both discourse relations across three target languages using parallel directional corpora and find that causal relations always lead to more implicit translations than confirmation relations.

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 procedural markers of textual cohesion that have long been an object of study in the Geneva school of pragmatics. In this chapter, we argue that Jacques Moeschler’s descriptions of causal connectives have contributed to provide theoretical insights on the nature of their procedural meaning, which have been recently shown to be compatible with models of human cognition from processing and acquisition studies across several languages. We review these studies in Sects. 2 and 3 respectively. In many of his contributions, Jacques Moeschler has also strived to find precise and testable features of connectives, with a potential for empirical validations in computer applications. In Sect. 4, we describe recent attempts to label automatically some of the meanings of connectives, using parallel corpora as training data, and show that this procedure improves their translation by automatic systems.

The search for translation universals has been an important topic in translation studies over the past decades. In this paper, we focus on the notion of explicitation through a multifaceted study of causal connectives, integrating four different variables: the role of the source and the target languages, the influence of specific connectives and the role of the discourse relation they convey. Our results indicate that while source and target languages do not globally influence explicitation, specific connectives have a significant impact on this phenomenon. We also show that in English and French, the most frequently used connectives for explicitation share a similar semantic profile. Finally, we demonstrate that explicitation also varies across different discourse relations, even when they are conveyed by a single connective.