Volume 62, February 2014, Pages 121–135
Highlights
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- The hypothesis that connectives can introduce given information is empirically tested.
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- The segment introduced by puisque is read faster when it introduces ‘given’ than ‘new’ information.
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- Parce que is judged to be less acceptable than puisque to convey ‘given’ information.
Abstract
I
argue that the communication of given information is part of the
procedural instructions conveyed by some connectives like the French puisque.
I submit in addition that the encoding of givenness has cognitive
implications that are visible during online processing. I assess this
hypothesis empirically by comparing the way the clauses introduced by
two French causal connectives, puisque and parce que,
are processed during online reading when the following segment is
‘given’ or ‘new’. I complement these results by an acceptability
judgement task using the same sentences. These experiments confirm that
introducing a clause conveying given information is a core feature
characterizing puisque, as the segment following it is read faster when it contains given rather than new information, and puisque is rated as more acceptable than parce que
in such contexts. I discuss the implications of these results for
future research on the description of the meaning of connectives.
Keywords
- Discourse connectives;
- Causality;
- Givenness;
- Processing;
- Semantic entailment;
- French
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