International Journal of Cognitive Research in Science, Engineering and Education (IJCRSEE)

IJCRSEE Editorial Team; Veronika  Prokopenya; Tatiana  Chernigovskaya

doi:10.5937/IJCRSEE1701085P

Authors

Veronika Prokopenya Laboratory for cognitive studies, Saint Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia
Tatiana Chernigovskaya Laboratory for cognitive studies, Saint Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5937/IJCRSEE1701085P

Keywords:

reference, coherence, pronouns in Russian, information structure, grammatical roles

Abstract

In the present study we explored structural parallelism, the preference of hearers to connect an unaccented pronoun to a referent occupying the same syntactic position. The traditional linguistic approach is based on the fact that referential preferences are associated with specific linguistic properties of potential antecedents of pronouns. Discourse-coherent approach is based on a hearer`s coherence-driven expectations about discourse continuation and supposes a structural parallelism effect to be a by-product of establishing relations, which provide the coherence of discourse. From this point of view, parallel reading is caused by information structure. In order to investigate the role of grammatical and information structures in the parallelism effect, and to choose between the theoretical approaches, we addressed a flexible word-order language, which has several ways of focusing, such as Russian. The two experiments demonstrated that the use of non-contrastive focusing strategy reveals parallelism bias to be equally strong for both subject-subject and object-object dependencies. We found that syntactic roles’ congruence is insufficient for the parallelism effect. Instead, parallel elements are required to occupy the topical position in the information structure of their clauses to provide the parallel reading. This evidence showed that structural parallelism effect is driven by information structure and is a by-product of establishing more general discourse relations, which provide its coherence.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Akmajian, A., and Jackendoff, R. (1970). Corefentiality and stress. Linguistic Inquiry 1, 124–126.

Ariel, M. (2001). Accessibility theory: An overview. Text representation: Linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects, 8, 29-87.

Arnold, J. E. (2001). The effect of thematic roles on pronoun use and frequency of reference continuation. Discourse Processes, 31(2), 137-162. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/S15326950DP3102_02

Avrutin, S., Lubarsky, S., & Greene, J. (1999). Comprehension of contrastive stress by Broca’s aphasics. Brain and Language, 70(2), 163-186. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/brln.1999.2154

Baauw, S., Ruigendijk, E., Cuetos, F., & Avrutin, S. (2011). The interpretation of stressed and non-stressed pronouns in Spanish language breakdown. Aphasiology, 25(3), 386-408. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2010.493295

Chambers, C. G., & Smyth, R. (1998). Structural par-allelism and discourse coherence: A test of centering theory. Journal of Memory and Language, 39(4), 593-608. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1998.2575

Cinque, G. (1993). A null theory of phrase and compound stress. Linguistic inquiry, 24(2), 239-297.

Danes, F. (Ed.). (1974). Papers on functional sentence perspective (Vol. 147). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.

Dubey, A., Keller, F., & Sturt, P. (2008). A probabilistic corpus-based model of syntactic parallelism. Cognition, 109(3), 326-344. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.09.006

Fodor, J. D. (2002). Prosodic disambiguation in silent reading. In PROCEEDINGS-NELS (Vol. 1, No. 32; VOL 1, pp. 113-132).

Garnham, A. (2001). Mental models and the interpretation of anaphora. Psychology Press.

Grober, E. H., Beardsley, W., & Caramazza, A. (1978). Parallel function strategy in pronoun assignment. Cognition, 6(2), 117-133. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(78)90018-5

Grosz, B. J., Weinstein, S., & Joshi, A. K. (1995). Cen-tering: A framework for modeling the local coherence of discourse. Computational linguistics, 21(2), 203-225.

Hobbs, J. R. (1979). Coherence and coreference. Cognitive science, 3(1), 67-90.

Kameyama, M. (1999). Stressed and unstressed pronouns: complimentary preferences. In Focus: Linguistic, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives, eds. P. Bosch, and R. van der Sandt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 306–321.

Kehler, A. (2002). Coherence, reference, and the theory of grammar. Stanford, CA: CSLI publications.

Kehler, A. (2005). Coherence-driven constraints on the placement of accent. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT-15), eds. E. Georgala, and J. Howell (Cornell University: CLC Publications). 98–115.

Kehler, A., Kertz, L., Rohde, H., & Elman, J. L. (2008). Coherence and coreference revisited. Journal of semantics, 25(1), 1-44. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffm018

Poesio, M., Stevenson, R., Di Eugenio, B., & Hitzeman, J. (2004). Centering: A parametric theory and its instantiations. Computational linguistics, 30(3), 309-363. doi:10.1162/0891201041850911

Prokopenya, V. (2014). Language breakdown as a result of limited processing resources. Activitas Nervosa Superior Rediviva, 56(1-2), 50.

Prokopenya, V., Chernigovskaya, T., and Khrakovskaya, M. (2014). Reference assignment by Russian aphatic speakers with agrammatism. In 11th Symposium of Psycholinguistics: Book of Abstracts (Tenerife: University of La Laguna). 75–76.

Reinhart, T. (2000). Strategies of anaphora resolution. In Interface Strategies, eds. H. Bennis et al. (Amsterdam: Royal Academy of Artsand Sciences). 295–325.

Reuland, E. (2003). Anaphoric dependencies: A win-dow into the architecture of the language system. Glot international, 7(1/2), 3-25.

Reuland, E. J. (2011). Anaphora and language design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rohde, H., & Kehler, A. (2014). Grammatical and information-structural influences on pronoun production. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29(8), 912-927. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2013.854918

Sheldon, A. (1974). The role of parallel function in the acquisition of relative clauses in English. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 13(3), 272-281. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(74)80064-2

Smyth, R. (1994). Grammatical determinants of ambiguous pronoun resolution. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 23(3), 197-229. doi:10.1007/BF02139085

Stevenson, R. J., Nelson, A. W., & Stenning, K. (1995). The role of parallelism in strategies of pronoun comprehension. Language and Speech, 38(4), 393-418. doi:10.1177/002383099503800404

Zuckerman, S, Vasic, N., Ruigendijk, E., and Avrutin, S. (2002-a). Experimental evidence for the Subject Rule. In Proceedings of IATL 18, eds. Y. Falk (The Israely Association for theoretical linguistics).

Zuckerman, S., Vasic, N., and Avrutin, S. (2002). The Syntax-Discourse Interface and the Interpretation of Pronominals by Dutch-Speaking Children. In BUCLD 26: Proceedings of the 26th annual conference on language acquisition and development, eds., S. F. B. Skarabela (Somerville: Cascadilla Press), 781–792.