This study investigates how quantifiers are used strategically to serve different argumentative goals. We report two experiments on how English speakers describe the results of school exams when being instructed to frame their descriptions either as a good or bad outcome. Experiment 1 shows that participants have clear preferences for specific…

It is well known that English speakers produce fewer pronouns when discourse contexts include more than one entity that matches the gender of the pronoun, i.e., gender effect. It is controversial, however, what causes the gender effect. Some suggest that it results from speakers' avoidance of linguistic ambiguity, while others suggest that it…

We argue that coherence relations (relations between propositions, such as "Concession" or "Purpose") are signalled more frequently and by more means than is generally believed. We examine how coherence relations in text are indicated by all possible textual signals, and whether every relation is signalled. To that end, we…

We often use pronouns like it or they without explicitly mentioned antecedents. We asked whether the human processing system that resolves such indirect pronouns uses the immediate visual-sensory context in multimodal discourse. Our results showed that people had no difficulty understanding conceptually central referents, whether explicitly…

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 study aims to establish whether connectives can create referential expectations in discourse, and, if so, what these expectations are based on: connective semantics or frequency distributions in language use. This was tested by comparing the processing of the connectives "and" and "but" in Dutch and Russian by means of an…

A comparison across spontaneous speech collected in the 1980s and the 2000s reveals a dramatic flip between the use of "said" versus "like" as enquoting devices. The greater use of "like" is reflected in a wide variety of quotation types including reported speech, thoughts, exclamations, and sounds. There is no…