We argue that prominence is a structure-building principle throughout the grammar of languages, and in particular for building discourse representations. We provide an explicit characterization of ...prominence as a) relational, b) dynamic, and c) as an attractor of operations. This characterization allows us to better account for other key notions of discourse representation and discourse models on prominence, such as referential activation, attention, accessibility, and salience. We show that these notions can either be derived from or are closely related to prominence. Finally, we illustrate the structure-building force of such a clearly defined notion of prominence by two recent studies on referential choice and structural attraction.
•Prominence is an organizational principle centered in discourse representation.•Prominence is essentially relational.•Prominence is dynamic and an element's prominence status shifts in time.•Prominent entities are structural attractors.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
We present the first ERP experiments that test the online processing of the scalar implicature
some
⇝
not all
in contexts where the speaker competence assumption is violated. Participants observe ...game scenarios with four open cards on the table and two closed cards outside of the table, while listening to statements made by a virtual player. In the full access context, the player makes a fully informed statement by referring only to the open cards, as
cards on the table
; in the partial access context, she makes a partially informed statement by referring to the whole set of cards, as
cards in the game
. If all of the open cards contain a given object X (Fullset condition), then
some cards on the table contain Xs
is inconsistent with the
not all
reading, whereas it is unknown whether
some cards in the game contain X
is consistent with this reading. If only a subset of the open cards contains X (Subset condition), then both utterances are known to be consistent with the
not all
implicature. Differential effects are observed depending on the quantifier reading adopted by the participant: For those participants who adopt the
not all
reading in the full access context, but not in the partial access context (weak pragmatic reading), a late posterior negativity effect is observed in the partial access context for the Fullset relative to the Subset condition. This effect is argued to reflect inference-driven context retrieval and monitoring processes related to epistemic reasoning involved in evaluating the competence assumption. By contrast, for participants who adopt the logical interpretation of
some
(
some and possibly all
), an N400 effect is observed in the partial access context, when comparing the Subset against the Fullset condition, which is argued to result from the competition between the two quantifying expressions
some cards on the table
and
some cards in the game
functioning in the experiment as scalar alternatives.
In discourse pragmatics, different referential forms are claimed to be indicative of the cognitive status of a referent in the current discourse. Referential expressions thereby possess a double ...function: They point back to an (existing) referent (form-to-function mapping), and they are used to derive predictions about a referent’s subsequent recurrence in discourse. Existing event-related potential (ERP) research has mainly focused on the form-to-function mapping of referential expression. In the present ERP study, we explore the relationship of form-to-function mapping and prediction derived from the antecedent of referential expressions in naturalistic auditory language comprehension. Specifically, the study investigates the relationship between the form of a referential expression (pronoun vs. noun) and the form of its antecedent (pronoun vs. noun); i.e., it examines the influence of the interplay of predictions derived from an antecedent (forward-looking function) and the form-to-function mapping of an anaphor (backward-looking function) on the ERPs time-locked to anaphoric expressions. The results in the time range of the P300 and N400 allow for a dissociation of these two functions during online language comprehension.
The role of literal meaning during the construction of meaning that goes beyond pure literal composition was investigated by combining cross-modal masked priming and ERPs. This experimental design ...was chosen to compare two conflicting theoretical positions on this topic. The indirect access account claims that literal aspects are processed first, and additional meaning components are computed only if no satisfactory interpretation is reached. In contrast, the direct access approach argues that figurative aspects can be accessed immediately. We presented metaphors (These lawyers are hyenas, Experiment 1a and 1b) and producer-for-product metonymies (The boy read Böll, Experiment 2a and 2b) with and without a prime word that was semantically relevant to the literal meaning of the target word (furry and talented, respectively). In the presentation without priming, metaphors revealed a biphasic N400-Late Positivity pattern, while metonymies showed an N400 only. We interpret the findings within a two-phase language architecture where contextual expectations guide initial access (N400) and precede pragmatic adjustment resulting in reconceptualization (Late Positivity). With masked priming, the N400-difference was reduced for metaphors and vanished for metonymies. This speaks against the direct access view that predicts a facilitating effect for the literal condition only and hence would predict the N400-difference to increase. The results are more consistent with indirect access accounts that argue for facilitation effects for both conditions and consequently for consistent or even smaller N400-amplitude differences. This combined masked priming ERP paradigm therefore yields new insights into the role of literal meaning in the online composition of figurative language.
This paper focuses on the relational notion of prominence, in which entities of equal type are ranked according to certain prominence-lending features. In German two demonstrative forms, “der” and ...“dieser”, can function like personal pronouns in English. It has been proposed that processing “der” involves computing a prominence hierarchy of the prior referents, and excluding the referent with the highest prominence rank. The demonstrative “dieser” has not been extensively tested. In the current study, personal and demonstrative pronominal forms were investigated following ditransitive contexts, where three potential antecedents are available, in two rating experiments. The personal pronoun showed flexibility in that it received equally high ratings for all three antecedents in canonical configurations. The ratings for dieser followed a graded sensitivity to thematic role prominence, with lowest scores when referring to prominent antecedents (agents) and the highest scores for the least prominent antecedents (patients), with scores for the medium prominence candidate (recipients) differing from both. Der followed a similar but not identical pattern, with a less marked difference between lower prominence candidates. Positional information also has a strong influence on demonstratives. In sum, final interpretation is sensitive to fine-grained differences in prominence hierarchies.
Language users employ creative and innovative means to refer to novel concepts. One example is place-for-event metonymy as in “How many bands played at Woodstock?” where the place name is used to ...refer to an event. We capitalize on the observation that place-for-event metonymy can on the one hand result in the conventionalization of the event reading (as is the case for “Woodstock”) but on the other hand can also be relatively short-lived as a function of the socio-cultural or historical impact of the respective event (e.g., “Egypt” to refer to one of the sites of the Arab Spring). We use place-for-event metonymy as a test case to tap into discrete stages of conventionalization and compare the processing of the place and the event reading of particular expressions, with ratings of the degree of conventionalization as predictors. In an event-related potential (ERP) reading study, we observed a modulation of the Late Positivity between 500 and 750 ms post-onset by condition (event vs. place reading) and degree of conventionalization. The amplitude of the positivity was most pronounced for event readings with a low degree of conventionalization (similar to previous findings from ad-hoc metonymy). Interestingly, place readings with a high degree of (event) conventionalization also evoked a pronounced positivity. The Late Positivity is viewed to reflect processing demands during reconceptualization required for proper utterance interpretation. Overall, the data suggest that stages of meaning evolution are reflected in the underlying neurophysiological processes.
Display omitted
•Place-for-event metonymy comes with different degrees of conventionalization.•Late Positivity is modulated by condition and degree of conventionalization.•Non-conventional event readings of place names pattern with ad-hoc metonymy.•Place names with highly conventionalized events also show Late Positivity.•Stages of meaning evolution are reflected in neurophysiological signals.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
•Pragmatic priming effects observed in offline measures are also seen online.•Pragmatic priming of scalar quantifiers results in a reduced positivity.•Pragmatic priming mirrors syntactic alignment.
...Priming of pragmatic enrichment has been found in behavioural studies. We extend this by examining the neural correlates of priming for two implicature categories, quantifiers and disjunctions. Participants engaged in a primed sentence-picture matching task where they were presented with a sentence (e.g., “some of the letters are Bs”) followed by a picture. In prime trials the pictures were either consistent with an enriched interpretation (some but not all) or a basic interpretation (some and possibly all) of the sentence. The pictures in target trials were always consistent with the enriched interpretation. Using ERPs, we found a priming effect on the picture reflected in a reduced positivity for quantifiers when the preceding trial had an enriched interpretation, and no effect for disjunction. The pragmatic priming effect can be dissociated from expectation-based processes. It suggests that abstract derivation processes are primed during pragmatic alignment.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
This article investigates the processing of intonational rises and falls when presented unexpectedly in a stream of repetitive auditory stimuli. It examines the neurophysiological correlates (ERPs) ...of attention to these unexpected stimuli through the use of an oddball paradigm where sequences of repetitive stimuli are occasionally interspersed with a deviant stimulus, allowing for elicitation of an MMN. Whereas previous oddball studies on attention toward unexpected sounds involving pitch rises were conducted on nonlinguistic stimuli, the present study uses as stimuli lexical items in German with naturalistic intonation contours. Results indicate that rising intonation plays a special role in attention orienting at a pre-attentive processing stage, whereas contextual meaning (here a list of items) is essential for activating attentional resources at a conscious processing stage. This is reflected in the activation of distinct brain responses: Rising intonation evokes the largest MMN, whereas falling intonation elicits a less pronounced MMN followed by a P3 (reflecting a conscious processing stage). Subsequently, we also find a complex interplay between the phonological status (i.e., accent/head marking vs. boundary/edge marking) and the direction of pitch change in their contribution to attention orienting: Attention is not oriented necessarily toward a specific position in prosodic structure (head or edge). Rather, we find that the intonation contour itself and the appropriateness of the contour in the linguistic context are the primary cues to two core mechanisms of attention orienting, pre-attentive and conscious orientation respectively, whereas the phonological status of the pitch event plays only a supplementary role.
One of the most debated topics in figurative language studies is whether the access to non-literal meanings is direct or indirect. Although models that argue for longer processing times for ...figurative compared to literal meanings have been largely criticized, figurative language is often associated with increased cognitive work. We investigated whether such greater cognitive work is indicative of more time-consuming processes or rather lower availability of figurative meanings, and whether there are differences between figurative types. We used a multi-response Speed-Accuracy Trade-off paradigm, where a meaningfulness judgment task was combined with a response deadline procedure to estimate speed and accuracy independently for metaphorical (Those dancers are butterflies) and metonymic sentences (That student reads Camilleri), compared with literal equivalents. While both metaphors and metonymies showed lower asymptote, that is, they were judged less accurately than literal counterparts, only metonymies were associated with a processing delay. Moreover, the difference in asymptote with respect to the literal condition was greater for metaphor than for metonymy. These findings indicate that the process that derives metaphor and metonymy is more complex than the process that derives literal meanings, even more so for metaphor. The processing delay, however, is present only in the case of metonymies. Taken together, our study offers key findings that reconcile a lively debate on the time course of figurative language comprehension, showing that the cost of non-literal meaning is not always a matter of time, and depends also on the figurative type.
L'un des sujets les plus débattus dans les études sur le langage figuré est l'accès au sens non littéral - est-il direct ou indirect. Bien que les modèles arguant des délais de traitement plus longs pour le langage figuré comparativement au sens littéral aient été largement critiqués, le langage figuré est souvent associé à un effort cognitif accru. Nous avons examiné si un tel effort cognitif accru indiquait le recours à des processus exigeant plus de temps, ou un accès réduit aux sens figurés, et s'il existait des différences entre les types de langage figuré. Nous avons utilisé un paradigme à réponses multiples du compromis vitesse-précision, où le sens d'une tâche de jugement était combiné à une procédure de délai pour la réponse afin d'évaluer la vitesse et la précision de façon distincte pour les phrases métaphoriques (Those dancers are butterflies) et les phrases métonymiques (That student reads Camilleri), en comparaison d'équivalents au sens littéral. Bien que les métaphores et les métonymies aient présenté des asymptotes plus basses, c'est-à-dire qu'elles ont été jugées avec moins de précision que leurs pendants au sens littéral, seules les métonymies étaient associées à un retard de traitement. De plus, la différence entre les asymptotes pour la condition littérale était plus grande pour la métaphore que pour la métonymie. Ces résultats indiquent que le processus qui dégage la métaphore et la métonymie est plus complexe que celui qui dégage le sens littéral, en particulier pour la métaphore. Le retard de traitement, toutefois, est seulement présent pour les métonymies. Dans son ensemble, notre étude présente des résultats clés qui résolvent un débat animé sur le temps requis pour la compréhension du langage figuré, en montrant que le coût du sens non littéral n'en est pas toujours un de durée, et qu'il dépend également du type de langage figuré.
Public Significance Statement
The study suggests that the derivation of figurative language (here, metaphor and metonymy) is more complex than the processing of literal meaning and that metaphor is more demanding than metonymy. This points to the need for a nuanced differentiation between different types of figurative language. The findings further bring together theoretical assumptions about figurative language and processing evidence, which has been a core concern of experimental pragmatics.
Full text
Available for:
CEKLJ, FFLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PEFLJ, UPUK
PDF
