To appear in:
T. Sanders, J. Schilperoord, W. Spooren (eds.) Text representation: linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Chapter 1
Text representation as an interface between language and its users
Ted Sanders and Wilbert Spooren
1 From meaning to processes, from sentence to discourse
The theme of this volume is text representation, or more specifically the linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects thereof. In our view, a text representation is a cognitive entity: a mental construct that plays a crucial role in both text production and text understanding. In text production it is the basis for lexical retrieval and for producing and combining the discourse units. In text understanding it is the result of the decoding of the linguistic information in a discourse. This book characterizes a field of study in which the two disciplines, linguistics and psycholinguistics, are growing together.
Traditionally, the linguists' task was to connect linguistic forms with meanings. This was usually done within a simplex model of communication, in which isolated sentences were connected to interpretations. Gradually the insight grew that such an enterprise cannot be undertaken without concern for the language user that produces and interprets an utterance. Consequently, the cognitive representations and actions of producers and interpreters entered the linguistic model. This development was stimulated by the rise of cognitive psychology in the early 1960s, at the expense of behaviorism. Cognitivists regarded the cognitive processes proper as their object to be explained, rather than the product of such processes, that is, the behavior in which these processes resulted. And since the end of the 1970s the view on linguistic communication has been extended in such a way that not only sentences, but also extended discourse is the object of study.
We can describe the present situation in the following schematic view on communication through language, although we realize that it is an oversimplified model, that in fact reflects the 'conduite metaphor of communication' (Reddy, 1979):
*INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE*
In this view, there is a producer who has a cognitive representation of what he intends to communicate; this is formulated in a linguistic code, called the text, and this text is decoded by the interpreter who can be said to understand a text once she has made a coherent representation of it. This view fits theories that describe the link between the structure of a text as a linguistic object, its cognitive representation and the processes of text production and understanding.
This schematic view also shows very clearly that research on the representation of language and text should by its very nature be an interdisciplinary enterprise. As such, one might expect a strong connection between linguistic analyses and psycholinguistic research. However, we believe it is fair to say that researchers have not always appreciated this interdisciplinary aspect, and have often worked in isolation, thereby maintaining the traditional borders between the two disciplines: linguists describe language structures, psycholinguists study mental representations and processes.
In recent years, this situation has improved significantly (see, among others, Gernsbacher & Givón, 1995). Topics like interclausal and inter-sentence relations (for instance, the contributions to Fayol & Costermans, 1997), information distribution (Chafe, 1994) and the structure of complete texts (Mann & Thompson, 1992), have received serious attention in descriptive studies and, to a lesser extent, in studies of text processing. Furthermore, linguists pay more attention to the cognitive aspects of language use (compare the emergence of cognitive linguistics), and psycholinguists give more serious consideration to the linguistic complexity of the object under study. This volume is intended to contribute to the information exchange among researchers from these disciplines.
Before giving an overview of the content of the different contributions to this volume, we first highlight themes we believe to be central to the cognitive and linguistic study of text representation. We start with three general tendencies in research on text representation. Then we introduce two linguistic characteristics that constitute a text, which will be the object of study in this volume.
2 Three major themes in research on text representation
2.1 Multiple representations
So far, we have been using the term 'the text representation'. This term is in fact an oversimplification. Both in linguistics and in psychology text representations are taken to be composite. In psycholinguistics we find this idea very explicitly present in the work of Kintsch and associates (Kintsch, 1998, but also in Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978 and in Van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983; for an overview see also Singer, 1990). Their research focuses on the receptive side of communication and states that readers make multiple representations of the sentences of a text: a surface code (a short-lived representation of the exact linguistic material in the sentences), a text base (containing the propositions expressed by the sentences and their interrelations), and a situation model (in which the linguistic material is integrated with the background knowledge of the reader).
In linguistics, the concept of multiple representations has also been developed. In formal semantics in the work of Kamp (see Kamp, 1981; Heim, 1982; Kamp & Reyle, 1993) in cognitive linguistics most explicitly in the work by Fauconnier (1985, 1994) on mental spaces. In general the idea is that linguistic expressions are instructions to update the current mental representation, that is based on previous discourse, background knowledge and inferencing. Thus, expressions are considered to have a procedural meaning. Or, as Fauconnier (1994, p. xviii) has put it:
Language does not itself do the cognitive building - it "just" gives us minimal, but sufficient, clues for finding the domains and principles appropriate for building in a given situation. Once these clues are combined with already existing configurations, available cognitive principles, and background framing, the appropriate construction can take place, and the result far exceeds any overt explicit information.
2.2 Underspecification of mental representations
The quote from Fauconnier brings us to the second important theme of recent research on text representations, the underspecification of mental representations. Contrary to what is maintained in the standard coding theory of meaning, it is fairly generally accepted in many branches of linguistics and psychology that what an utterance means cannot in any easy, transparent and compositional way be connected to the meaning of the individual elements in the utterance and their interrelation. An utterance explicitly codes only part of the meaning of the utterance into explicit linguistic material, the rest having to be provided by inferencing. In linguistics this point has been formulated forcefully by Sperber and Wilson (1992, chapter 1) and Fauconnier (1994, Introduction), but it is in fact prominent in most descriptive accounts of coherence (see Bublitz, Lenk & Ventola, 1999, for a recent overview). It is even one of the major tenets, in a much more radical(1) form, in, e.g., conversation analysis (cf. Pomerantz & Fehr, 1997). The same linguistic items will be interpreted differently in different situations and contexts, and hence any adequate theory of meaning will have to allow for rich inferential mechanisms. The Gricean program (e.g., Grice, 1975) is one such attempt to provide the necessary inferential power: Under the assumption of cooperativeness, participants in a conversation will generate implicatures in order to extend the literal meaning of an utterance and be able to make a coherent representation of the discourse. This inferential mechanism has been explored systematically by Levinson (1991), for instance to account for the binding properties of anaphors. In the field of text linguistics, Spooren (1997) uses a similar mechanism to account for so-called underspecified uses of connectives (cases where coherence relations are not (completely) matched by the meaning of t(2)he connectives that occur in the text).
In psychology there are numerous findings demonstrating the underspecification of linguistic material. For instance, Graesser, Singer, and Trabasso (1994) have suggested that in narrative texts causal connections function as a default, thus allowing for coherence relations to remain unmarked. Noordman and Vonk (1998) and Sanders and Noordman (2000), suggest that such a view is promising for expository texts as well. In the latter study it is found that causal relations lead to faster processing of the connected information, but still lead to a more integrated representation. Taking the role of non-linguistic factors, such as reader's characteristics, into account, Noordman and Vonk (Noordman, Vonk & Kempff, 1992; Noordman & Vonk, 1992) have shown that depth of processing of causal relations is dependent on the reader's goals and knowledge.
2.3. Dynamic representations
A third recurrent theme is that text representations are constructed dynamically: The effect of a language element on a representation is dependent on the current state of that representation, which is updated incrementally(3). Most of the current formal semantic systems (Situation Semantics, File Semantics, Discourse Representation Theory, etc.) specifically incorporate this aspect. In psycholinguistic text production and reception systems, incrementation and dynamicity are omnipresent (see Andriessen, De Smedt & Zock, 1996; Garnham, 1996; Sanders & Van Wijk, 1996; Schilperoord, 1996).
The vocabulary used to capture this aspect of text representation is usually that of spreading activation (cf. Anderson, 1983). Although the status of spreading activation models as theories of natural language production and interpretation is under dispute (cf. Levelt, 1989, p. 20), they have the promise to quite easily capture the flexibility needed to model the temporal course of discourse comprehension and production. The insight that the cognitive processes of text production and interpretation can be modeled as dynamic processes in which activation fluctuates, and that this process is influenced, or even to a large extent determined by the linguistic characteristics of the text, raises one of the most important challenges at the intersection of linguistic and psycholinguistic studies of discourse. Fortunately, there is also an ongoing use of sophisticated empirical methods which enable researchers to ask and find answers to quite precise questions. For instance, a dynamic view on the process of discourse comprehension leads to the expectation that while a reader proceeds through the text, the activation of concepts, facts and events as parts of a discourse representation fluctuates constantly. So, hypotheses considering activation patterns can be tested with on-line methods like reading time registration, naming tasks or eye movement registration (see Haberlandt, 1994, for an overview of such methods). Eventually, the fluctuating activation patterns settle into a relatively stable memory representation of the text. Several discourse comprehension models are based on these insights and empirical findings, such as the Structure Building Framework (Gernsbacher, 1990) the Landscape model of Reading (Van den Broek, Young, Tzeng & Linderholm, 1998) and the Construction-Integration model (Kintsch, 1998). Questions of how exactly this activation fluctuates, and how the activation is influenced by the linguistic characteristics of the text are currently major research questions, that are partly addressed in contributions to this volume, among others by Gaddy, Van den Broek & Sung in chapter 3.
It is important to note that there is a similar tendency in research on production, even though there is in general less attention for production studies, as Levelt (1989) notices in his handbook Speaking, because of the bias in psycholinguistics towards perception research, at the cost of production research. Along the same lines, Kintsch, presenting an overview of discourse psychological work (1994, p. 728) remarks that "many psychological studies have concerned themselves with this problem in the past few years, although overwhelmingly with the comprehension rather than the production side." Where empirical findings such as longer or shorter reading times of segments are taken to indicate the level of activation of a concept being processed during text understanding, the on-line registration of pause times opens a promising route to gain further insight in the on-line processes of text production. Schilperoord (1996) has used the method of analyzing the location and duration of pauses during written discourse production in an attempt to open up the 'black box' of a discourse producer's cognitive representation. He found that text producers tend to pause longer before segments located high in a structural hierarchy of the text under production, than before segments located low in such a hierarchy. If we assume that differences in pause time reflect differences in cognitive effort needed to retrieve information from Long Term Memory, then it can be hypothesized that the hierarchical structure of discourse is a crucial factor in determining the on-line level of accessibility of information (Schilperoord & Sanders, 1997, 1999). This line of work, in which a cognitively inspired text-analysis (Sanders & Van Wijk, 1996) is combined with on-line psycholinguistic research methods, is an example of how the combination of linguistic and psycholinguistic methods contributes to the development of integrated theories of language structure and language processes. Similar tendencies can be found in research in Cognitive Linguistics, a research paradigm not specifically aimed at the discourse level, on issues like the polysemy of prepositions (Sandra & Rice, 1995), epistemic modality (J. Sanders & Spooren, 1996) or the study of metaphor and figurative speech (see among many others, Gibbs, 1994, 1996). In this volume, chapter 4 by Giora and Balaban, is another example of such a study on methaphor.
3. Two constituting principles of text: referential and relational coherence
Now that we have discussed general properties and tendencies in research on text representation, an obvious question emerges: What are the exact characteristics of the text, the object of representation? We discuss the ones we believe to be most important, i.e. those that determine a set of sentences to be a text rather than a loose set of sentences.
3.1. What makes a text a text?
A constituting characteristic of texts is that they show connectedness. The question of how to characterize this connectedness is generally considered crucial in discourse studies. A dominant stance is that coherence explains best for this connectedness, where coherence is a characteristic of the representation rather than of the text itself. In other words, coherence is considered a mental phenomenon; it is not an inherent property of a text under consideration. Language users establish coherence by relating the different information units in the text. The notion of coherence has a prominent place in both (text-)linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of text and discourse.
Although this is not a particularly new view of coherence - it is a dominant thesis in most recent work (see, among many others, Van Dijk & Kintsch 1983; Garnham & Oakhill 1992; Hobbs 1990; Noordman & Vonk, 1997; Sanders, Spooren & Noordman, 1992) - it is a crucial starting point for theories that aim at describing the link between the structure of a text as a linguistic object, its cognitive representations and the processes of text production and understanding. And in our view it is this type of theory, located at the intersection of linguistics and psycholinguistics that could lead to significant progress in the field of discourse studies. Generally speaking, there are two respects in which texts can cohere:
1. Referential coherence: units are connected by repeated reference to the same object;
2. Relational coherence: text segments are connected by establishing coherence relations like Cause-consequence between them.
In this volume the role of both types of coherence in text processing is discussed. Now that we have identified the types of representation and the constituting principle of text, we can state a central theme of this volume in different terms: A major issue is the relationship between the linguistic surface code (what Givón, 1995, calls 'grammar as a processing instructor') and the meaning representations. Both coherence phenomena under investigation - referential and relational coherence - have clear linguistic indicators that can be taken as processing instructions, which will typically affect the surface representation. For referential coherence these are anaphoric devices such as pronouns, and for relational coherence these are connectives and (other) lexical markers of relations.
3.2. Referential coherence
The relevant linguistic indicators for referential coherence are pronouns and other devices for anaphoric reference. Ever since the seminal work of linguists like Chafe (1976) and Prince (1981), both functional and cognitive linguists have argued that the grammar of referential coherence can be shown to play an important role in the mental operations of connecting incoming information to the existing mental representations. For instance, referent NPs are identified as either those that will be important and topical, or as those that will be unimportant and non-topical. Hence, topical referents are persistent in the mental representation of subsequent discourse, whereas the non-topical ones are non-persistent. Recently, more and more empirical data from corpus studies become available which underpin this cognitive interpretation of referential phenomena, following a route guided by functional linguists such as DuBois (1980).
In a distributional study, Givón (1995), for instance, shows that in English, the indefinite article a(n) is typically used to introduce non-topical referents, whereas topical referents are introduced by this. In addition, there is a clear interaction between grammatical subjecthood and the indefinite article this: most this-marked NPs also appear as grammatical subjects in a sentence, while a majority of a(n)-marked NPs occurred as non-subjects. Across languages there appears to be a topic persistence of referents; in active-transitive clauses the topic persistence of subject NPs is systematically larger than that of object NPs.
In several publications Ariel (1988, 1990) has argued that regularities in grammatical coding should indeed be understood to guide processing. She has studied the distribution of anaphoric devices and she has suggested that zero anaphora and unstressed pronouns co-occur with high accessibility of referents, whereas stressed pronouns and full lexical nouns signal low accessibility. This co-occurrence can easily be understood in terms of cognitive processes of activation: high accessibility markers signal the default choice of continued activation of the current topical referent. Low accessibility anaphoric devices such as full NPs or indefinite articles signal the terminated activation of the current topical referent, and the activation of another topic. Ariel (1988, 1990) has argued that binding conditions on the distribution and interpretation of pronominal and anaphoric expressions actually are the 'grammaticalized version' of cognitive processes of attention and accessibility of concepts that are referred to linguistically. Speakers encode the degree of accessibility of mental structures in several ways. Each referential expression is a kind of retrieval device for the listener. In fact, Ariel proposes to define referring expressions in terms of a processing procedure: zero-anaphors and pronominal expressions encode highly accessible concepts, where lexical anaphors refer to less accessible referents (see also Chafe 1994, for a processing view on linguistic structures of 'given' and 'new').
In experimental research on text processing, quite some work has been done which can be taken to demonstrate the 'psychological reality' of linguistic indicators of referential coherence. On-line studies of pronominal reference have resulted in the formulation of cognitive parsing principles for anaphoric reference (cf. Garrod & Sanford, 1994; Sanford & Garrod, 1994). For instance, it is easier to resolve a pronoun with only one possible referent, and it is easier to resolve pronouns with proximal referents than distant ones. As for the time course, eye fixation studies have repeatedly shown that anaphoric expressions are resolved immediately (e.g., Carpenter & Just, 1977; Ehrlich & Rayner, 1983). Consider an example like (1).
(1) a. The guard mocked one of the prisoners in the machine shop.
b. He had been at the prison for only one week.
When readers came upon ambiguous pronouns such as he in (1b), they frequently looked back in the text. More than 50% of these regressive fixations were to one of the two nouns in the text preceding the pronoun, suggesting that readers indeed attempted to resolve the pronoun immediately. As for the meaning representation, it has been shown that readers have difficulty to understand the text correctly when the antecedent and referent are too far apart and reference takes the form of a pronoun.
On a more global text level, research on the exact working of accessibility markers as processing instructions is rare, but a good example is Vonk, Hustinx and Simons (1992). They show the relevance of discourse context for the interpretation of referential expressions. Sometimes anaphors are more specific than would be necessary for their identificational function (for instance, full NPs are used rather than pronominal expressions). The authors convincingly argue that this phenomenon can be explained in terms of the thematic development of discourse: if a character is referred to by a proper name after a run of pronominal references, then the name itself serves to indicate that a shift in topic is occurring. Readers process the referential expressions differently, as becomes apparent from reading times.
Whereas anaphoric reference modulates the availability of previously mentioned concepts, cataphoric devices change the availability of concepts for the text that follows. Gernsbacher (1990) and her colleagues have demonstrated the reader's sensitivity for this type of linguistic indicators of reference. They contrasted cataphoric reference by way of the indefinite a(n) versus definite this to refer to a newly introduced referent in a story. So the new referent egg was introduced either as 'an egg' or as 'this egg'. It was hypothesized that the cataphor this would signal that a concept is likely to be mentioned again in the following story and that therefore the this-cataphor results in a higher activation. Subjects listened to texts and where then asked to continue the text after the critical concept. They appeared to refer sooner and more often to a concept introduced by this than by an. These and other results show that concepts that were marked as a potential discourse topic by this are more strongly activated, more resistant to being suppressed in activation, as well as more effective in suppressing the activation of other concepts (Gernsbacher, 1990; Gernsbacher & Shroyer, 1989). It is this type of findings that provides the psycholinguistic underpinning for the idea of 'grammar as a processing instructor'.
3.2. Relational coherence
So far, we have discussed examples of the way in which linguistic signals of referential coherence affect text processing. We now move to signals of relational coherence. In many approaches to discourse connectedness, coherence relations are taken to account for the coherence in readers' cognitive text representation (cf. Hobbs, 1979; Mann & Thompson, 1986; Sanders et al., 1992; Sanders, Spooren & Noordman, 1993). Coherence relations are meaning relations which connect two text segments (i.e. minimally clauses). Examples are relations like Cause-consequence, List and Problem-solution. These relations are conceptual and they can, but need not, be made explicit by linguistic markers. Below, we will first focus on the second aspect of relational coherence, that on the level of the surface code: linguistic markers such as connectives and signaling phrases. After that we will move to the level of the meaning representation: the nature of the relations themselves.
Ever since Ducrot (1980) and Lang (1984), there have been linguistic accounts of connectives as operating instructions. The basic idea is that a connective has the function of relating the content of the connected segments in a specific type of relationship. Anscombre and Ducrot (1977), for instance, analyze but as setting up an argumentative scale (for instance, the (un)desirability of John), with one segment tending towards the negative side of the scale and the other towards the positive side:
(2) John is rich, but dumb.
In Chapter 9, Snoeck Henkemans explores the relationship between this type of argumentative approaches to connectives and the text-linguistic ones that were considered earlier above.
In his influential work on Mental Spaces, Fauconnier (1985, 1994) treats connectives as one of the so-called space-builders, linguistic expressions that typically establish new mental spaces. Mental spaces are mental constructs set up to interpret utterances, "structured, incremental sets [...] and relations holding between them [...], such that new elements can be added to them and new relations established between their elements" (Fauconnier, 1994, p. 16). Other examples of space builders are prepositional phrases (In 1929, From her point of view), adverbs (really, probably). A connective acting as a space-builder is an if-then conditional, as in 'If I were a millionaire, my VW would be a Rolls' or 'If he had listened to his mother, this criminal would be a Saint'. Such expressions if p then q set up a new mental space H in which a p and q hold. So, if p is the space builder and in this new space my VW from the initial space is identified with the Rolls in the new space (for the detailed analyses see Fauconnier 1994, chapters 3 and 4 and Sweetser, 1996). Fauconnier argues that the solution to some of the problems of traditional semantics, such as opacity, presupposition and the like, falls out naturally from these mechanisms.
In the same vein, Spooren (1989) has argued that but-coordinations typically funtion to contrast conflicting information coming from different perspectives, and that this may even affect the truth-conditional level. For instance, (3a) is possible, but (3b) is a contradiction (Spooren, 1989, p. 69).
(3a) Cassius Clay was shy, but Muhammed Ali wasn't.
(3b) Muhammed Ali was shy, but Muhammed Ali wasn't
This type of dynamic approach to connectives 'as processing instructors' is becoming more and more important, not in the least because of the rise of Cognitive Linguistics as a new branch on the linguistic tree. Is there any psycholinguistic work showing the relevance of ideas like this?
Indeed, in various on-line processing studies the function of linguistic markers is examined. These studies have primarily aimed at the investigation of the processing role of the signals per se, rather than on more sophisticated ideas like the exact working of 'space building'. The experimental work typically includes the comparison of reading times of identical textual fragments with different linguistic signals preceding them. Recent studies on the role of connectives and signalling phrases show that these linguistic signals affect the construction of the text representation (cf. Deaton & Gernsbacher, in press; Millis & Just 1994; Noordman & Vonk 1997; Sanders & Noordman 2000).
Millis and Just (1994), for instance, investigated the influence of connectives like because immediately after reading a sentence. When participants had read two clauses that were either linked or not linked by a connective, they judged whether a probe word had been mentioned in one of the clauses. The recognition time to probes from the first clause was consistently faster when the clauses were linked by a connective. The presence of the connective also led to faster and more accurate responses to comprehension questions. These results suggest that the connective does influence the representation immediately after reading.
Deaton and Gernsbacher (in press) combined on-line and off-line measures to investigate readers' use of because. They found that two causally related clauses connected by because were read more rapidly than when they were presented without the conjunction. When the clauses were conjoined by because, the second clauses were also recalled more frequently in a prompted recall test.
Generally speaking, studies on the influence of linguistic markers on text representation show a rather inconsistent pattern. Sometimes linguistic markers give rise to better structure in free recall (Meyer, Brandt & Bluth, 1980), to faster and more accurate reactions on a probe task, to faster and more accurate responses to comprehension questions (Degand, Lefèvre & Bestgen, 1999; Millis & Just, 1994), and to better recall in a prompted recall task (Deaton & Gernsbacher, in press), but they do not lead to more information recalled (Britton, Glynn, Meyer & Penland, 1982; Meyer, 1975). At the same time, on-line data suggest that the presence of linguistic markers facilitates processing (Britton et al., 1982; Deaton & Gernsbacher, in press).
Thus far, we have discussed the role of connectives and signaling phrases in discourse processing. A preliminary conclusion might be that they can be treated as linguistic markers which instruct readers in how to connect the new discourse segment with the previous one (Britton, 1994). In the absence of such instructions readers have to determine for themselves what coherence relation connects the incoming segment to the previous discourse. Such an inference process requires additional cognitive energy and results in longer processing times. If this idea has any validity, it implies that the coherence relations themselves would have a major influence on discourse processing as well. One might expect that the type of relation that connects two discourse segments, be it causal, additive, contrastive etc., affects the discourse representation.
Here we move into another area where the combination of text linguistic and discourse psychological insights has lead to significant progress: the categorization of coherence relations. In the last decade, a significant part of research on coherence relations has focused on the question how the many different sets of relations should be organized (Hovy, 1990; Knott & Dale, 1994; Pander Maat, 1998; Redeker, 1990; Sanders, 1997a). Sanders et al. (1992, 1993) have started from the properties common to all relations, in order to define the 'relations among the relations', relying on the intuition that some coherence relations are more alike than others. For instance, the relations in (4), (5) and (6), all express (a certain type of) causality, whereas the ones in (7) and (8) do not. Furthermore, a negative relation is expressed in (7), as opposed to all other examples, and (8) expresses an enumeration or addition.
A dominant distinction in existing classification proposals is that between so-called content, ideational, external or semantic relations on the one hand, and presentational, internal and pragmatic relations, on the other hand. In the first type of relations, segments are related because of their propositional content, i.e. the locutionary meaning of the segments. They describe events that cohere in the world. The relation in (9) can be interpreted as semantic because it connects two events in the world; our knowledge allows us to relate the segments as coherent in the world. A relation like (9) could be paraphrased as "the cause in the first segment (S1) leads to the fact reported in the second segment (S2)" (Sanders, 1997a).
(9) The neighbours suddenly left for Paris last friday. So they are not at home.
(10) The lights in their living room are out. So the neighbours are not at home.
In (10) however, the two discourse segments are related because we understand the second part as a conclusion from evidence in the first, and not because there is a causal relation between two states of affairs in the world: It is not because the lights are out that the neighbours are not at home. The causal relation (10) could be paraphrased as "the description in S1 gives rise to the conclusion or claim formulated in the S2." Hence, in the second type of relation the discourse segments are related because of the illocutionary meaning of one or both of the segments. The coherence relation concerns the speech act status of the segments.
If this distinction is applied to the set of examples above, the causal relation (4) is semantic, whereas (5) and (6) are pragmatic. This systematic difference between types of relations is noted by many students of discourse coherence. Still, there is quite a lot of discussion about the exact definition of a distinction like this (see e.g., Bateman & Rondhuis, 1997; Degand, 1996; Hovy, 1990; Knott & Dale, 1994; Knott, 1996; Knott & Sanders, 1998; Martin, 1992; Moore & Pollack, 1992; Oversteegen, 1997; Pander Maat, 1998; Sanders, 1997a; Sanders & Spooren, 1999). At the same time, several researchers have come up with highly similar distinctions, and there seems to be basic agreement on the characteristics of the prototypical relations (Sanders, 1997a). Moreover, very similar distinctions have been shown useful in describing the differential meaning of conjunctions (Sweetser, 1990). Also, the saliency of categorizations like these has been shown in experiments in which, among other tasks, language users were asked to judge the similarity of relations. Still, the discussion on this issue is clearly continued in this volume, especially in section 2 (chapters 6 to 9).
One of the emerging tendencies in recent linguistic research on the classification of coherence relations is the relevance of the notions perspective and subjectification. In several influential publications, Ducrot has stressed the diaphonic nature of discourse. Even in monologual texts traces can be found of other 'voices', information that is not presented as fact-like, but from a particular point-of-view, either the current speaker's (subjectified information, in the terminology of J. Sanders & Spooren, 1997) or another cognizer's (perspectivized information). Langacker has contributed much to the study of the linguistic effects of notions like subjectification (e.g., Langacker, 1990) and this notion also seems valid for the study of coherence relations and connectives (Pander Maat & Sanders, 1999; Verhagen, 1995, and some other contributions to Stein & Wright, 1995). Although perspective remains an elusive notion for linguistics and psycholinguistics alike, Fauconnier's mental space framework seems adequate in capturing this intriguing aspect of language (J. Sanders, 1994; J. Sanders & Redeker, 1996).
If categorizations of coherence relations and connectives indeed have cognitive significance, they should show relevant in areas like language development, both diachronic (grammaticalization, cf. Sweetser, 1990; Traugott, 1988; Traugott & Heine, 1991) and synchronic (language acquisition), and discourse processing. In all three areas, substantial studies are under way (Evers-Vermeul, 2000; Spooren & Sanders, in prep.), and there already exists suggestive evidence. Research on first language acquisition shows that the order in which children acquire connectives shows increasing complexity, which can be accounted for in terms of the relational categories mentioned above: additives before causals, positives before negatives (see Spooren, Sanders & Visser, 1994; Spooren, 1997). And in text processing, there is work on the role of (different types of) coherence relations in the construction of a meaning representation. However, at first sight, results of experimental studies on that issue provide a less clear picture than the one for the role of linguistic markers, especially when it concerns expository rather than narrative texts. Perhaps this situation is largely due to the fact that it is difficult to design reading experiments in which coherence relations or text structures are varied in a succesful and independent way, while at the same time avoiding the use of ill-formed texts (what Graesser, Millis, and Zwaan (1997), have called "textoids").
Nevertheless, the idea that coherence relations affect text processing does get support from results of processing studies. Several studies suggest a processing difference between causal and non-causal relations. For instance, causally related events in short narratives are recalled better (Black & Bern, 1981; Trabasso & Van den Broek, 1985; Trabasso & Sperry, 1985). Keenan, Baillet and Brown (1984) and Myers, Shinjo and Duffy (1987) demonstrated that the effect of causal connectedness on memory for sentences is greatest for moderate levels of causality. Also, causally related sentences are read faster (Haberlandt & Bingham, 1978), and the reading time decreases when the causality increases (Keenan et al., 1984, Myers et al., 1987).
Fewer studies exist for expository text. One example is a study by Meyer and Freedle (1984). They claimed that differences exist in the amount of organization of different types of text structure. The better organizing types are Comparison, causation and problem-solution, whereas collection is a weaker organizing type. These structure types are rather similar to the often distinguished types of coherence relations. In a free recall experiment, Meyer and Freedle expected readers to reproduce more information from better organized types than from less organized ones. The results show that recall of the causation and comparison passages was indeed superior to the recall of the collection passage.(4) However, there are some problems with the Meyer and Freedle study, see Horowitz (1987) and Sanders & Noordman (2000) for further details.
Sanders and Noordman (2000) embedded a similar text segment in two different contexts. In one case it was a Solution to a Problem, in the second case the same segment was part of an addition. It was found that problem-solution relations lead to faster processing, better verification and superior recall. The authors conclude that the processing of a text segment depends on the relation it has with preceding segments. Perhaps the most interesting finding in this experiment is the contrast in the effect of the two independent variables: linguistic markers (implicit or explicit) and type relations (problem-solution or list). Explicit marking of the relations resulted in faster processing, but did not affect recall. However, verification data concerning the representation immediately after reading, show an effect of the linguistic marker. This finding is quite similar to the effect Millis and Just (1994) found for the influence of because.
Hence, it can be concluded that the relational marker has an effect during on-line processing, but that its influence decreases over time. This contrasts with the effect of the coherence relation, which is also manifest in the recall. This contrast is similar to another frequently observed finding in language comprehension: initially a reader or listener constructs the surface representation of a sentence, but after a short time interval only the meaning or gist of the message is retained. Sachs (1967) found this effect for the form and meaning of sentences which participants had to identify as identical or different. Results like these strongly support the idea that coherence relations are an indissoluble part of the cognitive representation itself, whereas linguistic markers like connectives and signalling phrases are merely expressions of these relations, which guide the reader in selecting the right coherence relation. This conclusion is highly compatible to a view on coherence in which linguistic markers, as part of the surface code, 'guide' the reader towards a coherent text representation (cf. Gernsbacher & Givón, 1995; Graesser et al., 1997; Noordman & Vonk, 1998).
So far, we have presented an overview of text-linguistic and psycholinguistic work on referential and relational coherence. This overview might suggest discourse processing to depend entirely on text characteristics such as the linguistic markers of referential and relational coherence. That is not the case. It is rather plausible that the role of coherence and its linguistic markers interacts with 'reader factors' like interestingness of materials (Spooren, Mulder & Hoeken, 1998), domain knowledge (Birkmire, 1985; McNamara & Kintsch, 1996), topic complexity (Spyridakis & Standal, 1987) reader's goals (Noordman et al., 1992) and verbal ability (Meyer, Young & Bartlett, 1989). We are convinced that the interaction of such reader's characteristics with text-structural properties are prime issues for further research on text processing (see also Kintsch, 1998).
However, the focus of this chapter, and in fact, of this entire volume, is on gaining further insight into the role of coherence and text structure itself. In many discourse psychological studies on the interaction of textual and reader's factors, the coherence of passages is varied by manipulating many different textual aspects of coherence at the same time, such as adding elaborative information, identification of anaphoric references, and even supplying background information. As a result, this type of research has often conflated coherence per se and various other textual aspects that potential influence coherence. As we have argued above, we think it is crucial for the further progress of the field, that we get a better grip on the linguistic factors that determine the cognitive discourse representation. This can only be achieved by a further cross-fertilization of the fields of text linguistics and discourse psychology. A good illustration of this point concerns the role of relational markers of text structure. It has been argued above that signaling phrases and connectives make existing relations explicit. This also implies that the use of the markers is bound to restrictions: not every connective can express every relation. In recent text-linguistic work we are beginning to understand what these restrictions are and how they interplay with the meaning expressed by the connected segments (cf. Knott & Dale, 1994; Pander Maat & Sanders, 1999 and several contributions to Risselada & Spooren, 1998). It is this type of insights that underlines the importance of further cooperation of text linguists and psycholinguists working on discourse (Sanders, 1997b).
4 The coherence of this volume
What can readers expect of this volume? The collected chapters typically present a cross-disciplinary account of text representation, by both linguists and psycholinguists. This implies that linguistic analyses of textual characteristics ultimately aim at accounting for the cognitive interpretation they can receive. At the same time, psycholinguistic studies focus on the relevance of text characteristics for theories of text processing, where text processing concerns both production and interpretation. An important benefit of this combination of text linguistics and psycholinguistics, and of production and understanding is that we will encounter various methodologies, which are complementary: linguistic analysis, text analysis, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, argumentation analysis, and the experimental psycholinguistic study of text processing. A final focus of this book is the comparison and further testing of linguistic and processing theories of text representation.
The following 12 chapters are divided in four sections. Section 1 deals with referential coherence in text and text representation, and especially with accessibility: how can the notion of varying accessibility explain for different referential forms, and what is the evidence for such a dynamic account of the cognitive representations language users have?
In section 2 focus shifts from referential to relational coherence in text and text representation, when the classification of coherence relations and connectives is discussed in a closely connected cluster of chapters, combining various theoretical approaches (from Relevance Theory to Argumentation Theory and cognitive accounts of coherence relations) and different empirical methods (from text-analysis to reading experiments).
Section 3 focuses on the cognitive representations of discourse and its relation to knowledge representations: how are they related? How large is the role of linguistic factors?
Finally, section 4 discusses an issue typically neglected in the previous sections: when coherence is said to exist, it exists between something, for instance, discourse units or text segments. But how are these segments defined? And when we distinguish between different linguistic levels of representation (word, clause, sentence, paragraph), do we know that these levels have any psychological validity?
Together, the chapters in these four sections present an overview of a growing field of interest, at the intersection of linguistics and psychology, the study of a phenomenon that is crucial to our behavior because it is the mostly used vehicle of communication: that of text and its cognitive representation.
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3. Strictly speaking there is no logical connection between dynamic systems and incremental systems, in that dynamic systems can be constructed that are not incremental and incremental systems that are not dynamic. Yet in every serious language interpretation system that we know of the two go together.
33. However, there are some problems with the Meyer and Freedle study, see Horowitz (1987) and Sanders and Noordman (2000) for further details.