2024/11/18 by Cécile Larralde, Morgan C. Moyer, Ira Noveck · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Mathematics · Psychology · #Artificial intelligence #Cognitive science #Coherence (philosophical gambling strategy) #Computer science #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition #Linguistics #Linguistics and Discourse Analysis #Mathematics #Natural language processing #Philosophy #Psychology #Representation (politics) #Set (abstract data type) #Variety (cybernetics) #linguistics and terminology studies
paper · open access · doi:10.1515/9783110711202-014
openalex publication_date 2024/11/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
In this chapter we review findings related to the processing of discourse markers (DMs), such as but, nevertheless, so, and therefore. We start by discussing psycholinguists’ earliest attempts to account for DMs’ processing before turning to investigations based on Coherence approaches, which attempt to classify DMs - at a discourse level - based on a set of primitive properties (such as source of coherence and polarity) that are assumed to underpin each. We then review findings from a range of studies that explore the representation and processing of a variety of DMs in content-rich sentences that typically rely on world knowledge (Marc fancies a small snack. He feels like having something sweet. Therefore/Nevertheless he gets a. . .). Generally, psycholinguistic work has been valuable to the study of DMs because it brings to the surface subtle features intrinsic to each. For example, experiments show that in certain languages expressions emerge to distinguish between objective as opposed to subjective causality (cf. Heidi won first prize so she is thrilled and Heidi won first prize so she is talented). Finally, we present our approach, in which we use arbitrary materials to create highly repeatable sentences (consider There is a B but/and/so there is no T, presented as part of a word-guessing game) in order to isolate the inferential impact of each DM in online processing. Compared to the truth functional connective and, the English DMs but and so are processed effortfully while also producing predictable consequences downstream. The chapter concludes by generalizing our findings to equivalent connectives in French.