Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T13:31:29.821Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Grammar modulates discourse expectations: evidence from causal relations in English and Korean

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2020

EUNKYUNG YI Open the ORCID record for EUNKYUNG YI [Opens in a new window]  and
JEAN-PIERRE KOENIG
EUNKYUNG YI*
Affiliation:
Seoul National University
JEAN-PIERRE KOENIG
Affiliation:
University at Buffalo
*
Address for correspondence: e-mail: yi.eunkyung@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper investigates whether differences in grammar affect the production of discourse relations. We report the results of two story continuation experiments on speakers of two typologically unrelated languages, English and Korean, and in two different discourse genres, monologues (Experiment 1) and conversations (Experiment 2), focusing on the contrast between the explanation discourse relation and the result discourse relation. Since the grammar of clause linkage in Korean, but not English, disfavors a backward causal order (explanation relation), we predicted that Korean speakers are less likely to produce EXPLANATION continuations in MONOLOGUES than English speakers. We also predicted that this difference disappears in conversation, as questions that can be uttered in conversations are not subject to the same constraints on clause linkage in Korean. The results confirmed our predictions. The effect of language on the production of discourse relations in monologue suggests that LINGUISTIC STRUCTURES can affect speakers’ discourse expectation and production, while the absence of language effect in conversation suggests that this language effect is not due to differences in the way speakers causally relate events or to conceptual or cultural differences in preferences for iconic discourse between English and Korean speakers.

Keywords

discourse expectationdiscourse relationsforward and backward causal relationsexplanationresultmonologueconversationcross-linguistic differenceEnglishKorean
Type
Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 99 - 127
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of UK Cognitive Linguistics Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We thank Gail Mauner and members of the Psycholinguistics Lab at the University at Buffalo for English data collection. We also gratefully acknowledge Hongmo Kang for his assistance running the experiment, and Justin Balash, Hongoak Yun, and Kwonhwan Ko for their comments on data coding. This study was supported by the Department of Linguistics’ Summer Research Fund at the University at Buffalo.

References

references

Altmann, G. T. & Kamide, Y. (1999). Incremental interpretation at verbs: restricting the domain of subsequent reference. Cognition 73(3), 247–264.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Au, T. K.-F. (1986). A verb is worth a thousand words: the causes and consequences of interpersonal events implicit in language. Journal of Memory and Language 25, 104–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C. & Tily, H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language 68, 255–278.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bebout, L. J., Segalowitz, S. J. & White, G. J. (1980). Children’s comprehension of causal constructions with ‘Because’ and ‘So.’ Child Development 51(2), 565–568.Google Scholar
Bloom, L., Lahey, M., Hood, L., Lifter, K. & Fiess, K. (1980). Complex sentences: acquisition of syntactic connectives and the semantic relations they encode. Journal of Child Language 7, 235–261.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brown, R. & Fish, D. (1983a). The psychological causality implicit in language. Cognition 14, 237–273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, R. & Fish, D. (1983b). Are there universal schemas of psychological causality? Archives de Psychologie 51, 145–153.Google Scholar
Chafe, W. L. (1979). The flow of thought and the flow of language. In Givón, T. (ed.), Discourse and syntax (Syntax and Semantics 12) (pp. 159–181). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. & Schaefer, E. F. (1987). Collaborating on contributions to conversations. Language and Cognitive Processes 2(1), 19–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cozijn, R., Commandeur, E., Vonk, W. & Noordman, L. (2011). The time course of the use of implicit causality information in the processing of pronouns: a visual world paradigm study. Journal of Memory and Language 64, 381–403.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dery, J. & Koenig, J.-P. (2015). A narrative-expectation-based approach to temporal update in discourse comprehension. Discourse Processes 52, 559–584.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diessel, H. (2001). The ordering distribution of main and adverbial clauses: a typological study. Language 77(3), 433–455.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diessel, H. and Hetterle, K. (2011). Causal clauses: a cross-linguistic investigation of their structure, meaning, and use. In Siemund, P. (ed.), Linguistic universals and language variation (pp. 21–52). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Ford, C. E. & Mori, J. (1994). Causal markers in Japanese and English conversations: a cross-linguistic study of interactional grammar. Pragmatics 4, 31–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garvey, C. & Caramazza, A. (1974). Implicit causality in verbs. Linguistic Inquiry 5(3), 459–464.Google Scholar
Hale, J. (2001). A probabilistic Earley parser as a psycholinguistic model. In Proceedings of the second meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Language Technologies (pp. 1–8). Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Hartshorne, J., Sudo, Y. & Uruwashi, M. (2013). Are implicit causality pronoun resolution biases consistent across languages and cultures? Experimental Psychology 60, 179–196.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hickling, A. K. and Wellman, H. M. (2001). The emergence of children’s causal explanations and theories: evidence from everyday conversation. Developmental Psychology 37(5), 668–683.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hobbs, J. R. (1979). Coherence and coreference. Cognitive Science 3, 67–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hobbs, J. R. (1985). On the coherence and structure of discourse. CSLI Report 85-37. CSLI. Menlo Park CA.Google Scholar
Hopper, P. J. (1979). Aspect and foregrounding in discourse. In Givón, T. (ed.), Discourse and syntax (Syntax and Semantics 12) (pp. 213–241). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Hwang, H. (2018). Semantic properties of pronouns modulate pronoun use: evidence from Cantonese. Discourse Processes 55(1), 92–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaeger, T. F. & Norcliffe, E. J. (2009). The cross-linguistic study of sentence production. Language and Linguistics Compass 3 /4, 866–887.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kehler, A. (2002). Coherence, reference, and the theory of grammar. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Kehler, A. & Rohde, H. (2016). Evaluating an expectation-driven Question-Under-Discussion model of discourse interpretation. Discourse Processes 54, 219–238.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kim, H. & Grüter, T. (2019). Cross-linguistic activation of implicit causality biases in Korean learners of English. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 22(3), 441–455.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kim, J. & Park, K. (2016). The implicit causality effect observed in Korean interpersonal verbs does not require causal connective. Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology 28(2), 221–239.Google Scholar
Levinson, S. C. (2000). Presumptive meanings: the theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levy, R. (2008). Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition 106(3), 1126–1177.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lucia, A. F. (1988). The development of children’s understanding of ‘Because’ and ‘So.’ Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 45, 262–279.Google Scholar
MacDonald, M. C. (1993). The interaction of lexical and syntactic ambiguity. Journal of Memory and Language 32(5), 692–715.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mann, W. C. & Thompson, S. A. (1988). Rhetorical structure theory: toward a functional theory of text organization. Text 8, 243–281.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McRae, K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J. & Tanenhaus, M. K. (1998). Modeling the influence of thematic fit (and other constraints) in on-line sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language 38(3), 283–312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nam, S. (2009). Event structures of experiencer predicates in Korean: their causal, temporal and focal sub-structure. Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Generative Approaches to the Lexicon, Pisa, Italy.Google Scholar
Norcliffe, E., Harris, A. C. & Jaeger, T. F. (2015). Cross-linguistic psycholinguistics and its critical role in theory development: early beginnings and recent advances. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 30(9), 1009–1032.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pickering, M. J. & Majid, A. (2007). What are implicit causality and consequentiality? Language and Cognitive Processes 22(5), 780–788.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pyykkönen, P. & Järvikivi, J. (2010). Activation and persistence of implicit causality information in spoken language comprehension. Experimental Psychology 57, 5–16.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rohde, H. (2008). Coherence-driven effects in sentence and discourse processing. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, San Diego.Google Scholar
Rohde, H., Levy, R. & Kehler, A. (2011). Anticipating explanations in relative clause processing. Cognition 118, 339–358.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rudolph, U. & Försterling, F., (1997). The psychological causality implicit in verbs: a review. Psychological Bulletin 121(2), 192–218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A. & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50(4), 696–735.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sanders, T., Spooren, W. & Noordman, L. (1992). Toward a taxonomy of coherence relations. Discourse Processes 15, 1–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sanders, T. & Sweetser, E. (2009). Causal categories in discourse and cognition (Cognitive Linguistics Research 44). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scholman, M., Rohde, H. & Demberg, V. (2017). ‘On the one hand’ as a cue to anticipate upcoming discourse structure. Journal of Memory and Language 97, 47–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sohn, H.-M. (2009). The semantics of clause linking in Korean. In Dixon, R. M. W. & Akhenvald, A. (eds), The semantics of clause linking: a cross-linguistic typology (pp. 285–317). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Spooren, W. & Sanders, T. (2008) The acquisition order of coherence relations: on cognitive complexity in discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 40(12), 2003–2026.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stewart, A. J., Pickering, M. J. & Sanford, A. J. (1998). Implicit consequentiality. Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1031–1036). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Van Bergen, G. & Bosker, H. R. (2018). Linguistic expectation management in online discourse processing: an investigation of Dutch inderdaad ‘indeed’ and eigenlijk ‘actually.’ Journal of Memory and Language 103, 191–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yi, E. (2019). Implicit causality and discourse relations in Korean. Korean Journal of Linguistics 44(1), 101–117.Google Scholar
Zwaan, R. A. (1996). Processing narrative time shifts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 22(5), 1196–1207.Google Scholar