In this study participants read plausible and implausible sentences containing concessive and causal relations in Chinese, for instance, "[Although/Because] he has a talent for language, he [doesn't like/likes] learning English." In two self-paced reading experiments (Experiments 1 and 2), we consistently found the plausibility effect at…

Drawing on a corpus of 35 hours of videotaped face-to-face conversations collected in Beijing and Hebei, China, this conversation analytic study examines self-praising behavior of Mandarin speakers in everyday social interaction. Focusing on two reporting practices--reporting another's words and reporting "just the facts"--the…

Frames are cognitive structures of knowledge grounded in people's social interaction in recurrent sociocultural activities or individual incidences. Discussion concerning the knowledge in frames largely focuses on its linguistic manifestation with regard to roles and role relations in scenes. Little attention has been paid to the scriptal…

There is general agreement that discourse markers help dialogue partners to highlight or locate available goal- or coherence-related information. There is, however, less agreement with regard to how the nature of the relation between the marked stretch of discourse and the rest of the dialogue should be defined. Recent work (Louwerse &…