Events 
| SFB Kolloquium |
| Montag, 14.04.2008 16:00 - 18:00 | |
|---|---|
|
Shravan Vasishth, University of Potsdam http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~vasishth/ Syntactic prominence in discourse: How clefts and left-dislocated topics modulate availability It is uncontroversial that information-structuring (IS) devices play a critical role in facilitating comprehension in real-time processing. For example, Krifka 2006 defines IS as ``information packaging that responds to the immediate communicative needs of interlocutors'' and, following Chafe 1976, restricts IS to ``those aspects that respond to the temporary state of the addressee's mind.'' Krifka partitions IS into two components: common-ground content, which is concerned with the truth-conditional information in a sentence, and common-ground maintenance, which dictates how the common-ground content should be modified. Clefting illustrates how CG management operations unfold over time. Clefting usually signals an exhaustive interpretation that results in a modification of the listener's CG content. Such a CG-management operation has been found to be computationally costly in real-time processing but, interestingly, lead to facilitation in processing during integration stages. I present the results of an eyetracking study involving Hindi clefted sentences that were part of a spatial reasoning task. This study demonstrates a rather more complex picture of clefting's impact on processing and its interaction with working memory load and given-new ordering. A second experiment reveals analogous effects due to left-dislocated topicalization via a syntactic structure that is superficially very similar to the clefting construction. Together, these studies present new evidence detailing the manner in which prominence modulates the accessibility of referential expressions during incremental sentence comprehension. |
|
| Kontakt | |
| Kontaktperson: | Gerhard Jäger |
| Homepage: | wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/gja |