Through a structured examination of four English causal discourse connectives, our article tackles a gap in the existing research, which focuses mainly on written language production, and entirely lacks attests on English spoken discourse. Given the alleged general nature of English connectives commonly emphasized in the literature, the underlying…

Domain restriction is a pervasive if often neglected part of discourse comprehension. Speakers and authors implicitly limit the domain of discourse of quantifiers (e.g., "everyone") and noun phrases (e.g., "the girls"). Our previous research shows that an initial temporal or locative prepositional phrase (PP), which introduces…

When telling a story, a speaker needs to refer to story characters using appropriate expressions, which requires a mental model of the discourse. We hypothesize that, compared to those of adults, children's discourse models are based more on factors that are less cognitively demanding, such as animacy, and as they grow older, discourse factors…

Reference production is often studied through single dimensions of contrast (e.g., "tall glass" when there are one or two glasses of varying height). Yet real-world communication is rarely so simple, raising questions about the factors guiding more complex referents. The current study examines decisions to mention set relations (e.g.,…

Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response…

This article concerns the use of independent "jos" "if"-clauses as directives (requests, proposals, and suggestions) in Finnish everyday conversation. It shows that clause types which are traditionally considered subordinate can be used without any main clauses and, thus, do not project further talk to follow in the same turn. Other participants…

Sarcasm production and comprehension have been traditionally described in terms of pragmatic factors. Lexical cues have received less attention, but they may be important potential indicators. A major obstacle to examining such features is determining sarcastic intent. One solution is to analyze statements explicitly marked as being sarcastic.…