31.1582, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Loureda, Recio Fernández, Nadal, Cruz (2019)

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Subject: 31.1582, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Loureda, Recio Fernández, Nadal, Cruz (2019)

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Date: Tue, 12 May 2020 16:41:54
From: Juan Bueno Holle [jotajotabueno at gmail.com]
Subject: Empirical Studies of the Construction of Discourse

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-3371.html

EDITOR: Óscar  Loureda
EDITOR: Inés  Recio Fernández
EDITOR: Laura  Nadal
EDITOR: Adriana  Cruz
TITLE: Empirical Studies of the Construction of Discourse
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 305
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Juan José Bueno Holle, Independent Researcher

SUMMARY

The volume “Empirical Studies in the Construction of Discourse”, edited by
Óscar Loureda, Inés Recio Fernández, Laura Nadal, and Adriana Cruz, collects
eleven chapters each dedicated to exploring methodological and theoretical
issues in the analysis of discourse. The discourse data presented in the
volume range primarily from Indo-European languages, including Spanish,
English, German, Swedish, French, and Dutch, as well as from Chinese. The
studies emphasize the various ways in which work in this area can and should
be carried out, with a strong focus on the potential of corpus-based and
experimental methods to reveal insightful analyses and raise novel questions. 
Each of the chapters investigates and reflects on one of three methodological
perspectives, 1) corpus analyses and 2) experimental methods, and 3) a
combination of both. 

The corpus analyses, on the one hand, study the relationships between the
language system and language use by providing corpus evidence of the
relationship between linguistic material and its function in discourse. The
experimental studies, on the other hand, study the potential correlations
between expressions at the discourse level and the processing and production
patterns of the users. When used in combination, these methods can potentially
effectively combine information about the context in which expressions are
used with information about the competence of users. Taken as a whole, the
volume aims to demonstrate the benefits of empirical approaches to discourse
phenomena by showing how empirical methodologies not only effectively
complement the theoretical study of discourse and expressions, but are a
central component that cannot be separated. Moreover, these empirical
methodologies illustrate and strengthen important links to other, related
disciplines, such as psychology, computer science, sociology, and statistics.

The chapters in the volume are ordered according to one of the three
methodological perspectives. The first section contains six chapters dedicated
to corpus-based studies of discourse phenomena. The central issue in this
section is the importance of discourse segmentation to isolate the scope of
discourse markers and other discourse-structuring cues and, subsequently, to
outline and delimit the uses of these markers and their values in discourse.
The second section includes three studies devoted to experimental analyses of
discourse markers. These studies focus on the complex relationship that
contextual enrichment, procedural semantics, and discourse relations between
segments have with respect to cognitive effects, processing patterns, and
processing strategies. The third section presents two contributions that
highlight the advantage of addressing discourse phenomena through the
combination of the two methodological approaches represented in the first two
sections. 

Part 1: Corpus-based studies

The first part of the book contains six studies. In the first chapter,
“Challenges in the contrastive study of discourse markers: The case of THEN”,
Karin Aijmer draws on a comparative analysis of English THEN, German
DENN/DANN, and Swedish DÅ, to show that a positional analysis and a
cross-linguistic approach are key to the comprehensive description of these
discourse markers. Aijmer asks: what are the similarities and differences
between the languages? What are the functions associated with in the initial
and final position of the utterance? How should the differences between
languages be explained? To answer these questions, the author compares the
uses of the three markers in the left and the right periphery, i.e. contexts
in which they seem interchangeable, and then compares the frequency with which
they are used as equivalents. As part of the analysis, Aijmer highlights the
usefulness of translator intuitions as an additional methodological tool. The
author concludes that the three discourse markers vary considerably in
function, especially in the right periphery, where significant differences can
be observed with respect to their uses at the content level, the discourse
level, and the illocutionary level.

In “Local vs. global scope of discourse markers: Corpus-based evidence from
syntax and pauses”, Ludivine Crible makes systematic annotations of corpora to
explore correlations between the syntactic and semantic-pragmatic features of
discourse markers and their degree of scope. In a corpus of spoken English,
Crible makes three types of annotations of indirect and independent cues: 1)
degree of syntactic integration, 2) position, and 3) co-occurrence between
pauses. The author then explores the correlations between these cues and the
degree of scope, local or global, that each discourse marker demonstrates.
Crible argues that the indirect and independent cues offer a reliable window
into the scope of three kinds of discourse markers: 1) topic-shifting vs.
topic-resuming, 2) coordinating vs. subordinating conjunctions, and 3) the
objective (or consequential) vs. subjective (or conclusive) uses of SO.
Specifically, a high degree of syntactic integration and an absence of
co-occurring pauses are shown to be associated with local scope, while
discourse markers with global scope tend to occur outside of syntactic
dependency structures, co-occur with pauses, and introduce hierarchically
larger and/or distinct units. In addition, the conclusions suggest that a more
fine-grained analysis of global scope is necessary as there is a possibility
that there is more than one type, thereby suggesting fruitful ways to
critically reconsider existing approaches to the scope of discourse markers
and, more generally, to the interdependence between annotation variables.

In the third chapter, “Prosodic versatility, hierarchical rank and pragmatic
function in conversational markers”, Antonio Hidalgo Navarro and Diana
Martínez Hernández present a series of acoustic analyses of discourse markers
in a corpus of conversational Spanish to support the idea that the degree of
prosodic realization, as defined by the F0 curve, accentual realization,
phonic dependence, and position of certain markers, helps determine the
hierarchical rank of a given discourse marker within the discourse structure
and, as a result, its pragmatic function in specific contexts. The study
focuses on corpus-based data of two specific discourse markers in Spanish,
BUENO and HOMBRE. The evidence suggests that the prosodic realization of these
markers is relevant in determining 1) the uses of BUENO as a procedural marker
with textual functions of continuity and rupture, and 2) the uses of HOMBRE as
a procedural marker with the modal function of attenuation of disagreement.
More generally, then, Hidalgo Navarro and Martínez Hernández demonstrate that
there is a relationship between the prosodic realization of a discourse marker
and the frequency with which that marker occupies a particular structural
hierarchy or carries out a particular discourse function.

In “A preliminary typology of interactional figures based on a tool for
visualizing conversational structure”, Guadalupe Espinosa-Guerri and Amparo
García-Ramón apply a visualization tool to a corpus of conversational Spanish
with the goal of showing the types of interaction patterns that arise from
hierarchical relationships in dialogic interactions. Using the distinction
between reactive and initiative relations between speaker turns,
Espinosa-Guerri and García-Ramón propose a novel typology of nine
interactional figures which are described using a visual illustration of the
formal connections between turns in dialogue. The authors argue that their
approach allows for the detection and classification of all possible
interactional structures. To the extent that their classification is valid,
they add, their work opens several possibilities for future research, namely,
1) the possibility of creating a relatively exhaustive typology of
interactions in dialogue, 2) the potential for the analyst to more easily
detect objects of interaction that would otherwise go unnoticed, 3) the
possibility of discovering correlations between the type of interventions
produced and certain speakers, and 4) the possibility of measuring the
rigidity or dynamism specific to particular dialogic genres.

The fifth chapter, “Causal relations between discourse and grammar: Because in
spoken French and Dutch” by Liesbeth Degand explores the use of argumentative
connectives as discourse markers through an analysis of their syntactic and
semantic features in corpora. Degand focuses on French PARCE QUE and Dutch
OMDAT. Both are causal connectives meaning ‘because’, can be coordinating or
subordinating, and operate at both the sentential and supra-segmental level.
As Degand makes clear, subordinating conjunctions generally do not contribute
systematically to the construction of discourse relations, since they do not
always link independent utterances or independent speech acts (due to a higher
syntactic dependency). However, based on the annotation and analysis of turn
management, co-reference between the linked segments, co-occurring discourse
markers, filled pauses, and prosodic integration, Degand demonstrates that
while both connectives do, in fact, function as subordinating conjunctions,
users sometimes employ them as syntactically independent, thus conferring on
them a discourse value. More generally, then, this study provides deeper
insight into the discursive consequences of the grammatical options of
coordination and subordination by showing that an isomorphic mapping does not
hold between subordinating conjunctions and objective causal relations on the
one hand, and coordinating conjunctions and subjective relations on the other.

In the sixth chapter, “A corpus-based comparative study of concessive
connectives in English, German and Spanish: The distribution of ALTHOUGH,
OBWOHL, and AUNQUE in the Europarl corpus”, Volker Gast examines the
subordinating concessive conjunction ALTHOUGH in English and its roughly
equivalent OBWOHL in German and AUNQUE in Spanish with annotated data from the
Europarl corpus. Gast identifies several features of concessives and their
interactions with distributional facts: 1) The structural position of the
linked clause (length and position), 2) the semantic relations between
clauses, 3) the level at which the connection exists (propositional, textual,
and illocutionary), and 4) the information structure patterns generated by
conjunction between the main and subordinate clause. Gast finds that ordering
asymmetries arise as OBWOHL clauses rarely precede the main clause in
comparison with AUNQUE and ALTHOUGH clauses. Further, OBWOHL exhibits a strong
bias towards ‘canonical’ concessivity and is linked to clausal and textual
connecting functions, while ALTHOUGH and AUNQUE are commonly used in
non-canonical, ‘relativizing’ concessives and display a wider range of
discursive uses. The author concludes that this difference is due to higher
positional restrictions for OBWOHL and the existence of further specialized
concessive connectives in German. Finally, Gast concludes that there are
distributional differences with respect to the level of linking, givenness
status, and topic-comment structure of the concessive, but these are largely
consequences of the asymmetries in the ‘basic’ type of semantic relation
(canonical, relativizing, adversative). 

Part 2: Experiment-based studies

The second part of the volume contains three studies. The first of these,
entitled “Processing patterns of focusing in Spanish” by Adriana Cruz and
Óscar Loureda, presents evidence from an eye-tracking experiment and a
comprehension test to analyze users’ processing patterns of three types of
focusing constructions: 1) unmarked identificational foci, 2) unmarked
restrictive foci and 3) structures with contrastive foci marked by the Spanish
focus operator INCLUSO. Cruz and Loureda find that the different focusing
constructions carry different pragmatic scales and that these, in turn, give
rise to different processing patterns. While both the unmarked and the marked
focus constructions are found to have similar total processing costs, in
unmarked utterances processing is found to be guided by conceptual input and
in marked utterances it is the rigidity of the procedural instruction of the
focus operator that determines processing and interpretation. The experimental
evidence and analysis presented therefore demonstrate that marked and unmarked
foci have semantic and syntactic properties that establish different
processing patterns. 

In “Expectation changes over time: How long it takes to process focus”,
Johannes Gerwien and Martha Rudka conceptualize focus-sensitive particles as
processing and comprehension-guiding devices. Specifically, the authors
explore how and why the German focus particle SOGAR (‘even’) modulates
comprehenders’ expectations about subsequent discourse. They report the
results of a two-alternative choice task that allows them to then observe
viewing behavior in a Visual World Paradigm experiment. The experiment
addresses four conditions by crossing factors on two axes, the presence vs.
absence of a focus operator and the high vs. low magnitude of expectation of
change. The findings demonstrate the immediate effect of the focus particle by
showing that when the focus particle induces a high degree of expectation
change during online comprehension, visual attention to focalized targets is
delayed. More generally, Gerwien and Rudka argue that the approach presented
allows for not only the identification of factors involved in how well people
can construct predictions about focus alternatives, but also the precise
moment when a focus particle exerts its effect in online comprehension.

In the last chapter of this section, “Processing implicit and explicit
causality in Spanish” by Laura Nadal and Inés Recio Fernández, the authors
examine the Spanish expression POR TANTO (‘therefore’, ‘so’) to address the
role of connectives as interpretive guides in the construction of discourse.
Nadal and Recio Fernández ask whether the explicit and causal relations in
segments linked by POR TANTO give rise to different processing patterns than
segments connected by implicit causality. Their theoretical claim is that
since the human mind is geared toward optimizing relevance in the face of
ostensive stimuli and seeks causal processing of information, causal implicit
relations should be predictable and inferable. In the case of the use of POR
TANTO, causality is explicitly marked by a procedural-meaning guide, which
therefore raises the question of what the actual contribution of discourse
markers is to understanding utterances and, ultimately to the construction of
discourse relations. The authors report the results of an eye-tracking study
and suggest that making the connective explicit in a consecutive relation that
is already inferable from the meaning of the lexical expressions in the
utterances slows down processing (measured in terms of longer total,
first-pass, and second-pass reading times). Therefore, the nature of
connectives as procedural guides might be nuanced since the extent to which a
connective determines processing varies depending on the type of discourse
relation at issue.

Part 3: Combined approaches

The final section of the book is comprised of two studies. The first is titled
“Subjectivity and Causality in discourse and cognition: Evidence from corpus
analyses, acquisition and processing” by Ted J.M. Sanders and Jacqueline
Evers-Vermeul. In this, Sanders and Evers-Vermeul examine how causality and
subjectivity condition discourse processing and motivate language use. The
authors incorporate data from Dutch, English, French, German, and Chinese
gathered using three complementary methodological approaches: 1) corpus
studies on language use, 2) experimental studies on language discourse
processing and representation, and 3) corpus-based and experimental studies on
language acquisition. The authors discuss how these approaches help explain
the system and use of causal relations and their linguistic expressions in
everyday language use, as well as the acquisition order of connectives. The
findings show that people indeed distinguish between several types of
causality and support the claim that causality and subjectivity are two basic
cognitive notions that organize knowledge of coherence relations. Furthermore,
Sanders and Evers-Vermeil argue that evidence from all three approaches is
needed to clarify not only whether subjectivity is involved but also whose
perspective is being represented and what type of subjectivity is invoked.

The final chapter, entitled “Subjectivity of English connectives: A corpus and
experimental investigation of result forward causality signals in written
language” by Marta Andersson, combines results collected from a corpus study
and from experimentation involving a sentence completion task and a
paraphrasing experiment. Andersson asks two main questions: 1) whether English
connectives AS A RESULT and FOR THIS REASON show clear tendencies for certain
discourse environments, and 2) which intuitions language users share about the
functions of each connective. The findings demonstrate that despite their
functional flexibility across different causal categories, English resultative
connectives show significant tendencies to mark specific coherence relations.
While AS A RESULT shows a strong preference in the marking of non-volitional
results with no subject of consciousness, FOR THIS REASON is more dispersed
across discourse domains and is clearly preferred in result relations with a
subject of consciousness. 

EVALUATION

As a whole, the volume puts together a unique combination of chapters that
address the study of discourse by relying on various types of empirical
evidence. They address a range of discourse phenomena including discourse
markers, connectives, focus operators, causality, subjectivity, and
interaction patterns. In many cases, the authors consider more than one of the
above phenomena at one time with the aim of discovering relationships between
them. In other cases, the authors consider a range of related linguistic cues,
such as the syntactic, semantic, or phonetic features of a particular
discourse item, the position of the item, or the existence or absence of
co-occurring pauses. Some of the chapters and, in particular, the experimental
studies, consider the processing costs of particular constructions using
eye-tracking data or alternative choice methods. 

While the relatively narrow range of topics in the study of the construction
of discourse that are covered in the volume could be seen as a drawback, the
fact that many of the chapters tackle similar, related topics offers the
reader a rounded view of specific phenomena. This is particularly the case,
for example, with the study of connectives. A total of five chapters are
dedicated to the analysis of connectives, two of which are corpus-based
studies, one is experimental, and two are mixed methods. The data presented
and the methodologies employed in these studies allow for considerable insight
into the many factors influencing the use and interpretation of connectives.
Similarly, although all of the chapters present analyses based on data from
Indo-European languages (only one study incorporates data from outside of this
language family, Chinese), the focus on data from one language family,
including from a range of meticulously annotated written and spoken corpora,
allows the reader a unique sense of the analytical depth that is increasingly
possible in the study of discourse in these languages, a depth that
researchers working with other, less studied language families could aspire
towards in various ways.

Finally, in addition to what the volume contributes to the study of the
construction of discourse, it is important to consider also the contribution
of the volume to the understanding and definition of empirical work in
linguistics. In this light, the studies present a somewhat narrow view of
empirical work as simply being comprised of either corpus-based approaches,
experimental approaches, or a combination. Because linguistic data of any kind
must be acknowledged to have been produced by specific speakers in specific
contexts, a detailed exploration of how data is collected, where, and by whom
is critical for assessing how corpora are assembled, how experiments are
carried out and, by extension, the validity of the empirical data they provide
and how that data is to be analyzed and interpreted. If research on the
construction of discourse is increasingly to consider empirical work as
central, as the contributors to the volume argue it should, then the question
of what constitutes well-collected, well-described, and well-analyzed
empirical data in this area needs to be meaningfully assessed and should be
viewed as a critical avenue for future work.

Overall, the studies collected here engage with important and current issues
in the field and contribute a range of novel data and perspectives through
which to consider both the nature of specific types of discourse constructions
and the way in which they can potentially be studied. The volume contributes
significant insights and the chapters can serve as valuable models for
empirical work for scholars at the graduate level and beyond.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Juan José Bueno Holle holds an MA in Applied Linguistics from the National
Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a PhD in Linguistics from the
University of Chicago. His research interests include language documentation,
Mesoamerican languages, and discourse pragmatics. His work has received
support from the Endangered Languages Development Programme (ELDP), the
National Science Foundation's Documenting Endangered Languages program
(NSF-DEL), and the Smithsonian Institution. He is the author of Information
structure in Isthmus Zapotec narrative and conversation published by Language
Sciences Press.





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