Small words, big effects? Subjective versus objective causal connectives in discourse processing

Abstract

Coherence relations and their linguistic markers play a significant role in the study of discourse processing and comprehension. A number of studies have shown that the presence of coherence markers, such as connectives, in a text facilitates the processing and representation of discourse. Therefore, connectives are assumed to function as processing instructions (e.g. Britton, 1994; Gernsbacher, 1997; Murray, 1995; Sanders & Spooren, 2007); they help the readers to arrive at the intended interpretation of the text. The main purpose of the current study was to get a better understanding of how the information encoded in connectives affects online discourse processing. More specifically, we focused on causal connectives, which in Dutch provide cues about the fine-grained distinction between subjective and objective causal relations. Objective causal relations express causality between events in the real world. In subjective causal relations, however, the causal relations does not exists in the real world but in the mind of the speaker who is drawing conclusions on the basis of events in the world. There are two reasons why it is relevant to study the notion of subjectivity in relation to causal connectives. First, in many languages of the world causal connectives seem to specialize in either subjective or objective causal relations (Stukker & Sanders, 2012). And second, subjective causal relations are assumed to be more complex than objective causal relations (Sanders, Spooren, & Noordman, 1992). This complexity is associated with longer processing times in reading experiments (Noordman & De Blijzer, 2000; Traxler, Bybee, & Pickering, 1997; Traxler, Sanford, Aked, & Moxey, 1997). In the current dissertation we present a series of eye-tracking experiments that were designed to investigate the influence of Dutch causal connectives on discourse processing. With respect to Dutch backward causal relations, the connective want is a prototypical marker of subjective causal relations, whereas omdat is a prototypical marker of objective causal relations (Degand & Pander Maat, 2003; Pit, 2003; Sanders & Spooren, 2009, 2012; Verhagen, 2005). In forward causal relations dus typically expresses subjective relations, whereas daarom is typically used in objective relations (Pander Maat & Degand, 2001; Pander Maat & Sanders, 2000, 2001; Stukker, 2005; Verhagen, 2005). Our results show that both backward and forward subjective causal connectives induce an immediate delay in processing times compared to their objective counterparts. These results reveal that causal connectives do more than just inform the reader that a causal coherence relation needs to be constructed between two pieces of text. They also provide information about the relative degree of subjectivity of that causal relation. On the basis of additional experiments we conclude that the processing complexity of subjective causal connectives and relations can be explained by the notion of speaker involvement (Pander Maat & Degand, 2001; Pander Maat & Sanders, 2000, 2001; Pit, 2003). Subjective causality requires the representation of the Mental Space of the thinking subject -be it the speaker, author, or a third person character in the discourse- who is responsible for the presented information. This representation comes at a processing cost.