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Abstract:
How does the speaker's choice of a linguistic construction
influence the mental representation that the listener develops?
Past research has established that comprehenders focus their
attention on prominent discourse referents more than other
referents. When a speaker considers a referent to be prominent for
the listener, pronouns are more natural, but fuller forms are more
natural for nonprominent referents. But what linguistic factors
affect the degree of prominence for each referent? Through a series
of experiments, this paper demonstrates that categories such as
"topic" and "focus" both affect discourse prominence. Furthermore,
discourse entities compete for prominence, such that an increase in
prominence for one entity results in a loss in prominence for the
other.
In Experiment 1, participants rated discourses like (1) for
naturalness. The stimuli introduced two characters, either as topic
and nontopic (as in b, with "topic" operationalized as subject), or
as nonfocus and focus (as in b').
1.a. The guests at the party sat in the livingroom, trying to
decide who to talk to.
b. Ann decided to say hi to Emily.
b'. The one Ann decided to say hi to was Emily.
c. Emily/ She...
c'. Ann/ She...
When "Ann" was the topic, as in (b), the results showed higher
ratings when sentence (c) referred to Ann with a pronoun, or to
Emily with a name. When "Emily" was the focus, as in (b'), the
pattern reversed: a pronoun was preferred for Emily, and a name was
preferred for Ann. These results established that despite the
traditional opposition between topic and focus, the two categories
have similar effects on the prominence of discourse referents.
But what happens when the discourse contains both a topic and
focus? Are they both prominent, or do they compete with each other?
Experiments 2 and 3 contrasted the focus with a discourse topic:
one character who was introduced at the beginning and subsequently
referred to with pronouns. When the nonfocus was a discourse topic,
the results showed a preference for using names for the focus. When
the nonfocus was not the discourse topic, however, this preference
disappeared. Thus, the degree of prominence of one character is not
only dependent on how that character is introduced, but also on the
status of other, competing, referents in the discourse. These
results are discussed in terms of their implications for the
gradient nature of prominence, and the competitive nature of
language processing.
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