While a large body of work in sentence comprehension has explored how different types of linguistic information are used to guide syntactic parsing, less is known about the effect of discourse structure. This study investigates this question, focusing on the main and subordinate discourse contrast manifested in the distinction between restrictive…

A considerable body of research has examined the age-old assertion that reading literature enhances empathy, however, mixed results have been found. The present study attempts to clarify such disparities, investigating the role of foregrounding in possible differences in readers' processing of literary texts and its connection with readers'…

Interpreting subjectivity in causal relations takes effort: Subjective, claim-argument relations are read slower than objective, cause-consequence relations. In an eye-tracking-while-reading experiment, we investigated whether connectives and stance markers can play a facilitative role. Sixty-five Chinese participants read sentences expressing a…

The article analyses the term discourse and discourse analysis with reference to Foucault and other critics. Foucault used the role of discourses in wider social processes of legitimating power, and emphasizing the construction of current truths. The article argues that discourse analysis, as employed by Foucault, concentrated on analysing power…

Negative sentences are hard to process when they are presented out of context. When embedded in a context of plausible denial their processing difficulty decreases or is completely eliminated. We investigated in six behavioral experiments whether the processing of negation is eased in a denial context triggered by discourse markers (e.g.…

Purpose: Using a discourse analytic approach, the purpose of this paper is to examine how genre impacts white readers when reading about historic acts of racial violence. Specifically, this study explores one white high school student's stance-taking as she read an informational text and an eyewitness narrative about the Tulsa Race Massacre.…

After reading, "few of the juniors were accepted," focus is on the students not accepted, the complement set. According to the Presupposition Denial Account, negative quantifiers, such as "few," convey a denial of expectation, or shortfall, which leads to complement set focus. In six experiments, we explored the role of the…

This article presents a self-paced reading study comparing the online processing of interclausal discourse relations in native speakers of English and German. The study aims to contribute to two overarching questions: First, it puts to the test the so-called causality-by-default hypothesis, which states that causality is a default assumption,…

This paper examines the ways that teachers use questions to promote metacognitive knowledge and skills in early childhood classrooms. Taking a Conversation Analytic approach, we show that although metacognitive questions were infrequent in our data, they could be used to create learning opportunities for students to develop their knowledge of…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaboratively draw on and remix discourses and practices from multiple socially indexed traditions. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on data from a year-long social design experiment, this study uses qualitative coding and traces discoursal markers of…

This study discusses the role of stylistic analysis in the development of critical language awareness (CLA) which is crucial for assessing ideologies transmitted in discourse. The Critical Stylistic approach is used to compare narrative strategies in fiction and non-fiction: in Ishiguro's novel "The Buried Giant" (2015) and in Wolff's…

Based on a report on Dr. Li Wenliang in the British mainstream BBC media under the epidemic of COVID-2019, this paper analyzes from three perspectives guided by Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar: transitivity, mood and personal pronoun. It is found that the material process appears most frequently which shows that the news reports mainly…

We propose that machine-learned computational models (MLCMs), in which the model parameters and perhaps even structure are learned from data, can complement extant approaches to the study of text and discourse. Such models are particularly useful when theoretical understanding is insufficient, when the data are rife with nonlinearities and…

Counterfactuals describe imagined alternatives to reality that people know to be false. Successful counterfactual comprehension therefore requires people to keep in mind both an imagined hypothetical world and the presupposed real world. "Counterfactual transparency," that is, the degree to which a context makes it easy to determine…

Narratives frequently represent perceptions that allow for multiple interpretations in terms of perspective: Perceptions can be interpreted from the narrator's viewpoint as well as the character's viewpoint. Two experiments examined the role of contextual viewpoint markers and verb tense in readers' interpretation of such ambiguous perceptions.…