Abstract
AbstractThe disambiguation and processing of coherence relations is often investigated with a focus on explicit connectives, such asbutorso. Other, non-connective cues from the context also facilitate discourse inferences, although their precise disambiguating role and interaction with connectives have been largely overlooked in the psycholinguistic literature so far. This study reports on two crowdsourcing experiments that test the role of contextual cues (parallelism, antonyms, resultative verbs) in the disambiguation of contrast and consequence relations. We compare the effect of contextual cues in conceptually different relations, and with connectives that differ in their semantic precision. Using offline tasks, our results show that contextual cues significantly help disambiguating contrast and consequence relations in the absence of connectives. However, when connectives are present in the context, the effect of cues only holds if the connective is acceptable in the target relation. Overall, our study suggests that cues are decisive on their own, but only secondary in the presence of connectives. These results call for further investigation of the complex interplay between connective types, contextual cues, relation types and other linguistic and cognitive factors.
Highlights
When reading a text or listening to a speaker, readers and listeners do not process the content of individual sentences as a random juxtaposition of propositions, but instead mentally construct coherence relations between these propositions (Mann & Thompson 1988)
We investigate the role of non-connective discourse cues in the disambiguation of coherence relations
We tested the effect of antonyms and resultative verbs on the disambiguation of contrast and consequence relations, respectively
Summary
When reading a text or listening to a speaker, readers and listeners do not process the content of individual sentences as a random juxtaposition of propositions, but instead mentally construct coherence relations between these propositions (Mann & Thompson 1988) Such pragmatic inferences happening above sentence level include relations of addition, contrast, consequence, temporality or condition, among others. Das and Taboada (2018) provide a comprehensive corpus study of discourse cues or “signals” (in their terminology), covering features such as polarity, tense, reference, semantic relations and many others. They showed that, most coherence relations are signalled by cues other than connectives, and that only 10.65% of all relations instances in their corpus are exclusively signalled by connectives
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