In this sentence the morphosyntactic properties of the pronoun effectively determine its referent to be Roger, at least in this written form and where there is no preceding context. In this respect the sentence above contrasts with the following, similar, one:īetty punished Roger three weeks ago because he didn’t do the dishes. Simply by knowing its form, we cannot tell whether it refers to Betty or to Diane. As far as its morphosyntactic properties go, the pronoun she is referentially indeterminate.
The sentence, however, has an interesting property. The word because is an explicit indication that a causal relation is intended, and the interpretation of the two clauses of the sentence is straightforward. Here the main clause introduces an event, and the subordinate, because, clause presents another event as the cause of the first. The question of implicit causality, however, arises in the simpler case of representing a single event and may affect the interpretation of text that explicitly presents another event as its cause.īetty punished Diane three weeks ago because she didn’t do the dishes. For many people, the central question about causality is how these causal chains are computed (e.g., Fletcher & Bloom, 1988 Myers & Duffy, 1990 Trabasso & van den Broek, 1985 van den Broek & Trabasso, 1986). The causal relations in a narrative often form complex causal chains that link events in the text. A reader who fails to recognize those causal relations cannot be said to understand the text fully. In this paper we examine the hypothesis that implicit causality contributes to local focusing by giving increased salience to one participant in each event mentioned in a text - the implicit cause of that event.Ĭomputing causal relations is a major component of building discourse models for narrative texts. An alternative view is that focusing need not be so constrained, but that a pronoun, for example, can find its referent among a (usually small) set of recently mentioned items. One unresolved issue is: How powerful are focus mechanisms? According to some theorists (e.g., Gordon, Grosz, & Gilliom, 1993 Greene, McKoon, & Ratcliff, 1992) these mechanisms typically ensure that at each point in a well-written text., though not necessarily in a text in a psycholinguistic experiment, one entity enjoys a privileged status, so that a pronoun will refer to that entity by default. However, the details of these mechanisms remain, for the most part, to be determined.
Both local, sentence level, and global, discourse level, mechanisms may contribute to whether an item is in focus and hence can readily be referred to again (e.g., using a pronoun). Some of the things mentioned in a text are in focus and, therefore, readily available for later reference, and others are not. It is one of these issues that we address in this paper. These issues, which can loosely be dubbed “issues-of focus,” are crucial to online theories of text comprehension, because the internal structure of discourse models determines which parts of those models are most available in memory. Another set of issues, and one that has received less attention in the psychological literature, concerns the internal structure of discourse models. One important issue is the extent to which discourse models are elaborated using information that is not explicit in a text, but which must be derived inferentially (see e.g., McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992, vs Garnham, 1992, and Glenberg & Mathew, 1992). However, beyond this basic specification, there is considerable disagreement about their nature and about the mental processes that build them. Discourse models contain representations of people, things, events (in the broad sense of that term used in semantic theory see e.g., Frawley, 1992, in which it covers acts, actions, states, and processes), and so on, in the real, or an imaginary, world.
There is a growing consensus that mental representations of the content of text take the form of discourse models (e.g., Garnham, 1981, 1987 Johnson-Laird & Garnham, 1980 Greene, McKoon, & Ratcliff, 1992 Stenning, 1978 Webber, 1979) and that the primary goal of a theory of text comprehension is to specify the nature of such models and of the processes that construct them.
0 kommentar(er)
