Volume 59, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Theoretical and experimental approaches to discourse expectations; Guest Editors: Evangelia Daskalaki, Torgrim Solstad and Juhani Järvikivi

In this article we investigate how speakers manage discourse expectations in dialogue by comparing the meaning and use of three Dutch discourse particles, i.e. wel , toch and eigenlijk, which all express a contrast between their host utterance and a discourse-based expectation . The core meanings of toch, wel and eigenlijk are formally distinguished on the basis of two intersubjective parameters: (i) whether the particle marks alignment or misalignment between speaker and addressee discourse beliefs, and (ii) whether the particle requires an assessment of the addressee’s representation of mutual discourse beliefs. By means of a quantitative corpus study, we investigate to what extent the intersubjective meaning distinctions between wel , toch and eigenlijk are reflected in statistical usage patterns across different social situations. Results suggest that wel , toch and eigenlijk are lexicalizations of distinct generalized politeness strategies when expressing contrast in social interaction. Our findings call for an interdisciplinary approach to discourse particles in order to enhance our understanding of their functions in language.

This article presents a linguistic account explaining particular mechanisms underlying the generation of expectations at the discourse level. We further develop a linguistic theory – the Empty Slot Theory – explaining the phenomenon of implicit verb causality. According to our proposal, implicit causality (IC) verbs introduce lexically determined slots for causal content of specific types. If the required information is not derivable from the current or preceding context, IC verbs generate the expectation that these slots will be filled in the upcoming discourse. The cognitive mechanism underlying the bias is grounded in the general processing strategy of avoiding accommodation. Empirical evidence for the proposed theory is provided in three continuation experiments in German with comprehensive semantic annotation of the continuations provided by the participants. The reported experiments consistently show that IC bias can be manipulated in systematic ways. Experiment 1 demonstrates important ontological constraints on causal content crucial for our theory. Experiments 2 and 3 show how IC biases can be manipulated in predictable ways by filling the hypothesized slots in the prompt. Experiment 2 illustrates that stimulus-experiencer (experiencer-object) verbs in contrast to causative agent-patient verbs can be manipulated with respect to coherence and coreference by employing adverbial modification. Filling the lexically determined slot of psychological verbs resulted in predictable changes in coherence relations and types of explanations, resulting in the predicted effects on coreference. Experiment 3 extends the empirical investigations to so-called “agent-evocator” verbs. Again, filling the semantic slot as part of the prompt resulted in predictable shifts in coherence relations and explanation types with transparent effects on coreference. The reported experiments shed further light on the close correspondence between coherence and coreference as a hallmark of natural language discourse.

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.

Current approaches to the human language faculty emphasize that during real-time processing anticipatory mechanisms play a vital role for people to parse and comprehend linguistic input at a sufficient pace. Consistent with this view, several Event-Related Potential (ERP) and behavioral self-paced reading (SPR) studies revealed a processing disadvantage for pre-nominal linguistic elements that (grammatically) mismatched with an expected upcoming noun. More recently, however, these findings have been challenged because the results are difficult to replicate. In the current study, I continue this line of replication research with a complementary method: eye tracking. I conducted two experiments aimed at reproducing prior findings of a SPR study of van Berkum, Jos J. A., Colin M. Brown, Pienie Zwitserlood, Valesca Kooijman & Hagoort Peter. 2005. Anticipating upcoming words in discourse: Evidence from ERPs and reading times. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 31(3). 443–467. The participants read two-sentence stories constructed to elicit a strong lexical prediction about an upcoming noun. To assess whether readers were activating the lexical prediction, the noun was preceded by two gender-inflected adjectives carrying an inflectional suffix that either matched or mismatched with the syntactic gender of the predicted noun. Overall, I did not obtain evidence for strong lexical prediction as the eye-tracking metrics revealed no processing disadvantage for mismatching adjectives (i.e., contrary to the findings of van Berkum et al.). In fact, in some cases readers allocated more processing resources to pre-nominal adjectives that morphologically matched with the gender of the predicted noun. These intriguing findings will be discussed in the context of the time course, the processing costs, and the validation processes of lexical predictions.

Corrective information is produced with higher prosodic prominence than non-corrective information. However, it remains unclear how corrective prosody is realized in different communicative settings. We conducted two production experiments to investigate whether interlocutors’ prosodic realization of corrective focus depends on each other’s knowledge state. Participants carried out a statement-response task in pairs (e.g., Speaker B: Tina had shrimp at a restaurant . Speaker A: No, she had beef at a restaurant .). Our focus is on the prosody of Speaker A’s utterance. We manipulated whether Speaker B’s statement was implausible in the context (e.g., a context where it is known that Tina actually hates seafood). Furthermore, the two experiments differed in whether Speaker B knew that their statement (e.g., about Tina eating shrimp at a restaurant) was (im)plausible. In Experiment 1, both speakers had access to the crucial context concerning the probability of Speaker A’s statement (Tina’s preferences about food). In Experiment 2, only Speaker A had access to this background information. We found that Speaker A’s prosody when responding to Speaker B was influenced by both (i) the contextual probability of Speaker B’s statements and (ii) Speaker B’s knowledge (or lack thereof) about the contextual probability. We present an analysis where the prosodic prominence associated with corrective information reflects the gap between expectation and reality – in this case, what Speaker A had expected Speaker B to say and what Speaker B actually says.