Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Selfish discourse (Underspecification in spoken and written discourse: interpretation, compensation and cognitive implications)
Período documentado: 2019-02-01 hasta 2021-01-31
I went to Germany for three months to carry out my secondment. During that time I ran a series of experiments on the offline comprehension of weak connectives and compensation strategies. The results show that compensation strategies indeed help make discourse relations more easily interpretable, but no interaction with different types of connectives was found. This study is currently in press (accepted) in Pragmatics & Cognition.
In the final 15 months of the project, I strived to complement the corpus-based and offline production data with online processing experiments to further check for interactions and comprehension effects. I first tested the interaction between contrastive connectives and structural parallelism (i.e. repetition of the verb phrase across the two clauses), and found that reading times were faster when the ambiguous ""and"" was used in a parallel sentence rather than a sentence with two different structures. This study was published in a second Discourse Processes paper.
I then designed a new set of experiments investigating the interaction between concessive connectives and negative polarity (e.g. do not, is not), and found that reading times were again faster when the ambiguous ""and"" was used in a negative sentence rather than an affirmative one. This study has been submitted as a journal article, still currently under review."
The results of the Action have a number of direct and indirect implications for society. First of all, it allows us to understand how much information is sufficient when we write or speak and when we can allow ourselves to remain ambiguous. Secondly, the project could inform language teaching policies by showing that weak connectives are not particularly detrimental to interpretation, especially when they are compensated in context, and that very frequent connectives such as 'and' or 'so' successfully trigger adequate inferences in discourse, which nuances the stigmatisation of these expressions as “lazy speech” features.