Text Representation

HUMAN COGNITIVE PROCESSING is a forum for interdisciplinary research on the

nature and organization of the cognitive systems and processes involved in
speaking and understanding natural language (including sign language), and
their relationship to other domains of human cognition, including general
conceptual or knowledge systems and processes (the language and thought
issue), and other perceptual or behavioral systems such as vision and non-
verbal behavior (e.g. gesture). 'Cognition' should be taken broadly, not only
including the domain of rationality, but also dimensions such as emotion and
the unconscious. The series is open to any type of approach to the above
questions (methodologically and theoretically) and to research from any
discipline, including (but not restricted to) different branches of psychology,
artificial intelligence and computer science, cognitive anthropology, linguistics,
philosophy and neuroscience. It takes a special interest in research crossing the
boundaries of these disciplines.

Editors
Marcelo Dascal, Tel Aviv University
Raymond W. Gibbs, University of California at Santa Cruz
Jan Nuyts, University ofAntwerp

Editorial address
Jan Nuyts, University of Antwerp, Dept. of Linguistics (GER),
Universiteitsplein 1, B 2610 Wilrijk, Belgium.
E-mail: nuyts@uia.ua.ac.be

Editorial Advisory Board

Melissa Bowerman, Nijmegen; Wallace Chafe, Santa Barbara, CA;
Philip R. Cohen, Portltmd, OR; Antonio Damasio, Iowa City, IA;
Morton Ann Gernsbacher, Madison, WI; David McNeill, Chicago, IL;
Eric Pederson, Eugene, OR; Fran~ois Recanati, Paris;
Sally Rice, Edmonton, Alberta; Benny Shanon, Jerusalem;
Lokendra Shastri, Berkeley. CA; Dan Slobin, Berkeley, CA;
Paul Thagard, Waterloo, Ontario

Volume8
Text Representation: Linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects
Edited by Ted Sanders, Joost schilperoord and Wilbert Spooren
Text Representation
Linguistic and
psycholinguistic aspects

Edited by

Ted Sanders
University of Utrecht

Joost Schilperoord
University ofTilburg

Wilbert Spooren
Free University, Amsterdam

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Amsterdam I Philadelphia
,(;)i;j~ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
\ _ __/ National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Text Representation : Linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects I edited by Ted Sanders, Joost
Schilperoord, Wilbert Spooren.
p. em. (Human Cognitive Processing, ISSN 1387-6724; v. 8)
Based on papers presented at a conference held July 1997, Utrecht University.
Includes bibliographical references and indeL
l. Discourse analysis--Psychological aspects--Congresses. I. Sanders, Ted. II.
Schilperoord, Joost. III. Spooren, Wibert. IV. Series.

P302.8.T49 2001
401 ~41--dc21 2001035506
ISBN 90 272 2360 2 (Eur.) /1 58811 077 X {US) {Hb; alk. paper)

C 2001- John Benjamins B.V.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
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John Benja.mins Publishing Co.· P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 ME Amsterdam· The Netherlands
John Benja.mins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 · usA
 Table of Contents

Preface vu

1. Text representation as an interface between language and its users 1

Ted Sanders & Wilbert Spooren

SECTION 1. ACCESSIBIUTY IN TEXT AND TEXT PROCESSING 27

2. Accessibility theory: an overview 29
Mira Ariel
3· The influence of text cues on the allocation of attention during
reading 89
Michelle L Gaddy, Paul van den Broek & Yung-Chi Sung
4 Lexical access in text production: On the role of salience in
metaphor resonance 111
Rachel Giora & Noga Balaban

SECTION 2. RELATIONAL COHERENCE IN TEXT AND TEXT PROCESSING 12.5

5. Semantic and Pragmatic relations and their intended effects 12.7
Alistair Knott
6. On the production of causal-contrastive although sentences in
context 153
Leo G. M. Noordman
7. Beyond elaboration: The interaction of relations and focus in
coherent text 181
Alistair Knott, ]on Oberlander, Michael O'Donnell, Chris Mellish
8. Unstressed en I and as a marker of joint relevance 197
Henk Pander Maat
9. Argumentation, explanation and causality: an exploration of
current linguistic approaches to textual relations 2.31
Francisca Snoeck Henkemans
V1 Text Representation

SECTION 3. fROM TEXT REPRESENTATION TO KNOWLEDGE

REPRESENTATION 247
10. Constructing inferences and relations during text comprehension 249
Arthur C. Graesser, Peter Wiemer-Hastings & Katja Wiemer-Hastings
IL Thinking about bodies of knowledge: Tests of a model for predicting
thoughts 273
Bruce K. Britton, Peter Schaeffer, Michael Bryan, Stacy Silverman &
Robert Sorrells

SECTION 4. SEGMENTATION IN TEXT AND TEXT REPRESENTATION 307

12. Conceptual and linguistic processes in text production; interactive or
autonomous? 309
Joost Schilperoord
13. Subordination and discourse segmentation revisited, or: Why matrix
clauses may be more dependent than complements 337
Arie Verhagen

Subject index 359

 Preface

The chapters of this book volume are all based on papers presented at the
International workshop on text representation: Linguistic and psycholinguistic
aspects, held at Utrecht University in July 1997. We are indebted to the Centre
for Language and Communication (CLC) and the Faculty of Arts of Utrecht
University, the Center for Language Studies (CLS) and the Discourse Studies
Group of Tilburg University, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Re-
search NWO and the Royal Academy of Sciences KNAW for their financial
support of this workshop and to the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics UIL OTS
(which now includes CLC) for logistic and financial support in the preparation
of the manuscript. We are very grateful to Gerben Mulder, Annelous van Rijn
and Martien Kroon for their invaluable help in editing this manuscript.
We would also like to thank the many colleagues who acted as reviewers of
the chapters:

Yves Bestgen Jan van Kuppevelt

Diane Blakemore Fons Maes
Lucille Chanquoy Bonny Meyer
Liesbeth Degand Joanna Moore
Jack DuBois Gisela Redeker
Charles Fletcher Manfred Stede
Bruce Fraser Mark Torrance
David Galbraith Carel Van Wijk
Morton Ann Gemsbacher Luuk Van Waes
Paul van den Hoven Jos van Berkum
EdHovy

Finally, we want to thank the editors of the Benjamins series Human Cognitive
Processing, especially Jan N uyts, for publishing this book volume in their series.

Ted Sanders, Joost Schilperoord, Wilbert Spooren

's-Hertogenbosch I Utrecht, December 2000
 CHAPTER 1

Text representation as an interface between

language and its users

Ted Sanders
Wilbert Spooren
University of Utrecht/Free University, Amsterdam

1. From meaning to processes, from sentence to discourse

The theme of this volume is text representation, or more specifically the

linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects thereof. In our view, a text representa-
tion is a cognitive entity: a mental construct that plays a crucial role in both text
production and text understanding. In text production it is the basis for lexical
retrieval and for producing and combining the discourse units. In text under-
standing it is the result of the decoding of the linguistic information in a
discourse. This book characterizes a field of study in which the two disciplines,
linguistics and psycholinguistics, are growing together.
Traditionally, the linguists' task was to connect linguistic forms with mean-
ings. This was usually done within a simplex model of communication, in
which isolated sentences were connected to interpretations. Gradually the
insight grew that such an enterprise cannot be undertaken without concern for
the language user that produces and interprets an utterance. Consequently, the
cognitive representations and actions of producers and interpreters entered the
linguistic model. This development was stimulated by the rise of cognitive
psychology in the early 1960s, at the expense of behaviorism. Cognitivists
regarded the cognitive processes proper as their object to be explained, rather
than the product of such processes, that is, the behavior in which these processes
resulted. And since the end of the 1970s the view on linguistic communication
has been extended in such a way that not only sentences, but also extended
discourse is the object of study.
We can describe the present situation in the following schematic view on
communication through language, although we realize that it is an oversimpli-
~ Ted Sanders and Wilbert Spooren

~ 0
Q,o
0

•
Figure 1. Communication through written text: From cognitive representation to
text, to cognitive representation (as seen by Laura van Beek, 9 years old)

fied model, that in fact reflects the 'conduite metaphor of communication'

(Reddy 1979).
In this view, there is a producer who has a cognitive representation of what
she intends to communicate; this is formulated in a linguistic code, called the
text, and this text is decoded by the interpreter who can be said to understand a
text once he has made a coherent representation ofit. This view fits theories that
describe the link between the structure of a text as a linguistic object, its cognitive
representation and the processes of text production and understanding.
This schematic view also shows very clearly that research on the represen-
tation of language and text should by its very nature be an interdisciplinary
enterprise. As such, one might expect a strong connection between linguistic
analyses and psycho linguistic research. However, we believe it is fair to say that
researchers have not always appreciated this interdisciplinary aspect, and have
often worked in isolation, thereby maintaining the traditional borders between
the two disciplines: linguists describe language structures, psycholinguists
study mental representations and processes.
In recent years, this situation has improved significantly (see, among
others, Gernsbacher & Giv6n 1995). Topics like interclausal and inter-sen-
tence relations (for instance, the contributions to Fayol & Costermans 1997),
information distribution (Chafe 1994) and the structure of complete texts
(Mann & Thompson 1992), have received serious attention in descriptive
studies and, to a lesser extent, in studies of text processing. Furthermore,
 Text representation as an interface between language and its users 3

linguists pay more attention to the cognitive aspects of language use (compare
the emergence of cognitive linguistics), and psycholinguists give more serious
consideration to the linguistic complexity of the object under study. This
volume is intended to contribute to the information exchange among re-
searchers from these disciplines.
Before giving an overview of the content of the different contributions to
this volume, we first highlight themes we believe to be central to the cognitive
and linguistic study of text representation. We start with three general tenden-
cies in research on text representation. Then we introduce two linguistic
characteristics that constitute a text, which will be the object of study in this
volume.

2. Three major themes in research on text representation

2.1 Multiple representations

So far, we have been using the term 'the text representation'. This term is in fact
an oversimplification. Both in linguistics and in psychology text representa-
tions are taken to be composite. In psycholinguistics we find this idea very
explicitly present in the work ofKintsch and associates (Kintsch 1998, but also
in Kintsch & van Dijk 1978 and in Van Dijk & Kintsch 1983; for an overview
see also Singer 1990). Their research focuses on the receptive side of communi-
cation and states that readers make multiple representations of the sentences of
a text: a surface code (a short-lived representation of the exact linguistic
material in the sentences), a text base (containing the propositions expressed
by the sentences and their interrelations), and a situation model (in which the
linguistic material is integrated with the background knowledge of the reader).
In linguistics, the concept of multiple representations has also been devel-
oped. In formal semantics in the work ofKamp (see Kamp 1981; Heim 1982;
Kamp & Reyle 1993) in cognitive linguistics most explicitly in the work by
Fauconnier ( 1985, 1994) on mental spaces. In general, the idea is that linguistic
expressions are instructions to update the current mental representation, that
is based on previous discourse, background knowledge and inferencing. Thus,
expressions are considered to have a procedural meaning. Or, as Fauconnier
( 1994, p. xviii) has put it:

Language does not itself do the cognitive building - it "just" gives us minimal,
but sufficient, clues for finding the domains and principles appropriate for build-
4 Ted Sanders and Wilbert Spooren

ing in a given situation. Once these clues are combined with already existing
configurations, available cognitive principles, and background framing, the ap-
propriate construction can take place, and the result far exceeds any overt explicit
information.

2.2 Underspecification of mental representations

The quote from Fauconnier brings us to the second important theme of recent
research on text representations, the underspecification of mental representa-
tions. Contrary to what is maintained in the standard coding theory of
meaning, it is fairly generally accepted in many branches of linguistics and
psychology that what an utterance means cannot in any easy, transparent and
compositional way be connected to the meaning of the individual elements in
the utterance and their interrelation. An utterance explicitly codes only part of
the meaning of the utterance into explicit linguistic material, the rest having to
be provided by inferencing.
In linguistics this point has been formulated forcefully by Sperber and
Wilson ( 1992, Chapter 1) and Fauconnier ( 1994, Introduction), but it is in fact
prominent in most descriptive accounts of coherence (see Bublitz, Lenk &
Ventola 1999, for a recent overview). It is even one of the major tenets, in a
much more radical 1 form, in, e.g., conversation analysis (cf. Pomerantz & Fehr
1997). The same linguistic items will be interpreted differently in different
situations and contexts, and hence any adequate theory of meaning will have to
allow for rich inferential mechanisms. The Gricean program (e.g., Grice 1975)
is one such attempt to provide the necessary inferential power: Under the
assumption of cooperativeness, participants in a conversation will generate
implicatures in order to extend the literal meaning of an utterance and be able
to make a coherent representation of the discourse. This inferential mecha-
nism has been explored systematically by Levinson (1991 ), for instance to
account for the binding properties of anaphors. In the field of text linguistics,
Spooren ( 1997) uses a similar mechanism to account for so-called underspeci-
fied uses of connectives (cases where coherence relations are not (completely)
matched by the meaning of the connectives that occur in the text).
In psychology there are numerous findings demonstrating the under-
specification of linguistic material. For instance, Graesser, Singer, and
Trabasso ( 1994) have suggested that in narrative texts causal connections
function as a default, thus allowing for coherence relations to remain un-
marked. Noordman and Vonk (1998) and Sanders and Noordman (2000),
 Text representation as an interface between language and its users S

suggest that such a view is promising for expository texts as well. In the latter
study it is found that causal relations lead to faster processing of the connected
information, but still lead to a more integrated representation. Taking the role
of non-linguistic factors, such as reader's characteristics, into account,
Noordman and Vonk (Noordman, Vonk & Kempff 1992; Noordman & Vonk
1992) have shown that depth of processing of causal relations is dependent on
the reader's goals and knowledge.

2..3 Dynamic representations

A third recurrent theme is that text representations are constructed dynami-

cally: The effect of a language element on a representation is dependent on the
current state of that representation, which is updated incrementally. 2 Most of
the current formal semantic systems (Situation Semantics, File Semantics,
Discourse Representation Theory, etc.) specifically incorporate this aspect. In
psycholinguistic text production and reception systems, incrementation and
dynamicity are omnipresent (see Andriessen, De Smedt & Zock 1996; Garnham
1996; Sanders & Van Wijk 1996; Schilperoord 1996).
The vocabulary used to capture this aspect of text representation is usually
that of connectionism. Although the status of connectionist models as theories
of natural language production and interpretation is under dispute (cf. Levelt
1989, p. 20), they have the promise to quite easily capture the flexibility needed
to model the temporal course of discourse comprehension and production.
The insight that the cognitive processes of text production and interpretation
can be modeled as dynamic processes in which activation fluctuates, and that
this process is influenced, or even to a large extent determined by the linguistic
characteristics of the text, raises one of the most important challenges at the
intersection of linguistic and psycholinguistic studies ofdiscourse. Fortunately,
there is also an ongoing use of sophisticated empirical methods which enable
researchers to ask and find answers to quite precise questions. For instance, a
dynamic view on the process of discourse comprehension leads to the expecta-
tion that while a reader proceeds through the text, the activation of concepts,
facts and events as parts of a discourse representation fluctuates constantly. So,
hypotheses considering activation patterns can be tested with on-line methods
like reading time registration, naming tasks or eye movement registration (see
HaberIandt 1994, for an overview of such methods). Eventually, the fluctuating
activation patterns settle into a relatively stable memory representation of the
text. Several discourse comprehension models are based on these insights and
6 Ted Sanders and Wilbert Spooren

empirical findings, such as the Structure Building Framework (Gernsbacher

1990) the Landscape model of Reading (Van den Broek, Young, Tzeng &
Linderholm 1998) and the Construction-Integration model (Kintsch 1998).
Questions of how exactly this activation fluctuates, and how the activation is
influenced by the linguistic characteristics of the text are currently major
research questions, that are partly addressed in contributions to this volume,
among others by Gaddy, Van den Broek & Sung in Chapter 3.
It is important to note that there is a similar tendency in research on
production, even though there is in general less attention for production
studies, as Levelt ( 1989) notices in his handbook Speaking, because of the bias
in psycholinguistics towards perception research, at the cost of production
research. Along the same lines, Kintsch, presenting an overview of discourse
psychological work ( 1994, p. 728) remarks that "many psychological studies
have concerned themselves with this problem in the past few years, although
overwhelmingly with the comprehension rather than the production side."
Where empirical findings such as longer or shorter reading times of segments
are taken to indicate the level of activation of a concept being processed during
text understanding, the on-line registration of pause times opens a promising
route to gain further insight in the on-line processes of text production.
Schilperoord ( 1996) has used the method of analyzing the location and dura-
tion of pauses during written discourse production in an attempt to open up
the •black box' of a discourse producer's cognitive representation. He found
that text producers tend to pause longer before segments located high in a
structural hierarchy of the text under production, than before segments lo-
cated low in such a hierarchy. If we assume that differences in pause time
reflect differences in cognitive effort needed to retrieve information from Long
Term Memory, then it can be hypothesized that the hierarchical structure of
discourse is a crucial factor in determining the on-line level of accessibility of
information (Schilperoord & Sanders 1997, 1999). This line of work, in which
a cognitively inspired text-analysis (Sanders & Van Wijk 1996) is combined
with on-line psycholinguistic research methods, is an example of how the
combination of linguistic and psycholinguistic methods contributes to the
development of integrated theories of language structure and language pro-
cesses. Similar tendencies can be found in research in Cognitive Linguistics, a
research paradigm not specifically aimed at the discourse level, on issues like
the polysemy of prepositions (Sandra & Rice 1995), epistemic modality (J.
Sanders & Spooren 1996) or the study of metaphor and figurative speech (see
among many others, Gibbs 1994, 1996 ). In this volume, Chapter 4 by Giora
 Text representation as an interface between language and its users 7

and Balaban, is another example of such a study on methaphor.

3· Two constituting principles of text: referential and relational

coherence

Now that we have discussed general properties and tendencies in research on

text representation, an obvious question emerges: What are the exact charac-
teristics of the text, the object of representation? We discuss the ones we believe
to be most important, i.e. those that determine a set of sentences to be a text
rather than a loose set of sentences.

3.1 What makes a text a text?

A constituting characteristic of texts is that they show connectedness. The

question of how to characterize this connectedness is generally considered
crucial in discourse studies. A dominant stance is that coherence explains best
for this connectedness, where coherence is a characteristic of the representa-
tion rather than of the text itself. In other words, coherence is considered a
mental phenomenon; it is not an inherent property of a text under consider-
ation. Language users establish coherence by relating the different information
units in the text. The notion of coherence has a prominent place in both
(text- )linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of text and discourse.
Although this is not a particularly new view of coherence- it is a dominant
thesis in most recent work (see, among many others, Van Dijk & Kintsch 1983;
Garnham & Oakhill 1992; Hobbs 1990; Noordman & Vonk 1997; Sanders,
Spooren & Noordman 1992)- it is a crucial starting point for theories that aim
at describing the link between the structure of a text as a linguistic object, its
cognitive representations and the processes oftext production and understand-
ing. And in our view it is this type of theory, located at the intersection of
linguistics and psycholinguistics that could lead to significant progress in the
field of discourse studies. Generally speaking, there are two respects in which
texts can cohere:

1. Referential coherence: units are connected by repeated reference to the

same object;
2. Relational coherence: text segments are connected by establishing cohe-
rence relations like CAUSE-CONSEQUENCE between them.
8 Ted Sanders and Wilbert Spooren

In this volume the role of both types of coherence in text processing is dis-
cussed. Now that we have identified the types of representation and the consti-
tuting principle of text, we can state a central theme of this volume in different
terms: A major issue is the relationship between the linguistic surface code
(what Giv6n 1995, calls 'grammar as a processing instructor') and the meaning
representations. Both coherence phenomena under investigation - referen-
tial and relational coherence - have dear linguistic indicators that can be
taken as processing instructions, which will typically affect the surface repre-
sentation. For referential coherence these are anaphoric devices such as pro-
nouns, and for relational coherence these are connectives and (other) lexical
markers of relations.

3.2. Referential coherence

The relevant linguistic indicators for referential coherence are pronouns and
other devices for anaphoric reference. Ever since the seminal work of linguists
like Chafe (1976) and Prince (1981), both functional and cognitive linguists
have argued that the grammar of referential coherence can be shown to play an
important role in the mental operations of connecting incoming information
to the existing mental representations. For instance, referent NPs are identified
as either those that will be important and topical, or as those that will be
unimportant and non-topical. Hence, topical referents are persistent in the
mental representation of subsequent discourse, whereas the non-topical ones
are non-persistent. Recently, more and more empirical data from corpus
studies become available which underpin this cognitive interpretation of refer-
ential phenomena, following a route guided by functional linguists such as
DuBois (1980).
In a distributional study, Giv6n ( 1995), for instance, shows that in English,
the indefinite article a( n) is typically used to introduce non-topical referents,
whereas topical referents are introduced by this. In addition, there is a clear
interaction between grammatical subjecthood and the indefinite article this:
most this-marked NPs also appear as grammatical subjects in a sentence, while
a majority of a(n)-marked NPs occurred as non-subjects. Across languages
there appears to be a topic persistence of referents; in active-transitive clauses the
topic persistence of subject NPs is systematically larger than that of object NPs.
In several publications Ariel (1988, 1990) has argued that regularities in
grammatical coding should indeed be understood to guide processing. She has
studied the distribution of anaphoric devices and she has suggested that zero
 Text representation as an interface between language and its users 9

anaphora and unstressed pronouns co-occur with high accessibility of refer-

ents, whereas stressed pronouns and full lexical nouns signal low accessibility.
This co-occurrence can easily be understood in terms of cognitive processes of
activation: high accessibility markers signal the default choice of continued
activation of the current topical referent Low accessibility anaphoric devices
such as full NPs or indefinite articles signal the terminated activation of the
current topical referent, and the activation of another topic. Ariel ( 1988, 1990)
has argued that binding conditions on the distribution and interpretation of
pronominal and anaphoric expressions actually are the 'grammaticalized ver-
sion' of cognitive processes of attention and accessibility of concepts that are
referred to linguistically. Speakers encode the degree of accessibility of mental
structures in several ways. Each referential expression is a kind of retrieval
device for the listener. In fact, Ariel proposes to define referring expressions in
terms of a processing procedure: zero-anaphors and pronominal expressions
encode highly accessible concepts, where lexical anaphors refer to less acces-
sible referents (see also Chafe 1994, for a processing view on linguistic struc-
tures of'given' and 'new').
In experimental research on text processing, quite some work has been
done which can be taken to demonstrate the 'psychological reality' of linguistic
indicators of referential coherence. On-line studies of pronominal reference
have resulted in the formulation of cognitive parsing principles for anaphoric
reference (cf. Garrod & Sanford 1994; Sanford & Garrod 1994). For instance, it
is easier to resolve a pronoun with only one possible referent, and it is easier to
resolve pronouns with proximal referents than distant ones. As for the time
course, eye fixation studies have repeatedly shown that anaphoric expressions
are resolved immediately (e.g., Carpenter & Just 1977; Ehrlich & Rayner 1983 ).
Consider an example like (1).

( 1) a. The guard mocked one of the prisoners in the machine shop.

b. He had been at the prison for only one week.

When readers came upon ambiguous pronouns such as he in (lb), they

frequently looked back in the text. More than 50% of these regressive fixations
were to one of the two nouns in the text preceding the pronoun, suggesting
that readers indeed attempted to resolve the pronoun immediately. As for the
meaning representation, it has been shown that readers have difficulty to
understand the text correctly when the antecedent and referent are too far
apart and reference takes the form of a pronoun.
10 Ted Sanders and Wilbert Spooren

On a more global text level, research on the exact working of accessibility

markers as processing instructions is rare, but a good example is Vonk,
Hustinx and Simons (1992). They show the relevance of discourse context for
the interpretation of referential expressions. Sometimes anaphors are more
specific than would be necessary for their identificational function (for in-
stance, full NPs are used rather than pronominal expressions). The authors
convincingly argue that this phenomenon can be explained in terms of the
thematic development of discourse: if a character is referred to by a proper
name after a run of pronominal references, then the name itself serves to
indicate that a shift in topic is occurring. Readers process the referential
expressions differently, as becomes apparent from reading times.
Whereas anaphoric reference modulates the availability of previously men-
tioned concepts, cataphoric devices change the availability of concepts for the
text that follows. Gemsbacher ( 1990) and her colleagues have demonstrated the
reader's sensitivity for this type of linguistic indicators of reference. They
contrasted cataphoric reference byway of the indefinite a(n) versus definite this
to refer to a newly introduced referent in a story. So the new referent egg was
introduced either as 'an egg' or as 'this egg'. It was hypothesized that the
cataphor this would signal that a concept is likely to be mentioned again in the
following story and that therefore the this-cataphor results in a higher activa-
tion. Subjects listened to texts and where then asked to continue the text after the
critical concept. They appeared to refer sooner and more often to a concept
introduced by this than by an. These and other results show that concepts that
were marked as a potential discourse topic by this are more strongly activated,
more resistant to being suppressed in activation, as well as more effective in
suppressing the activation of other concepts (Gemsbacher 1990; Gernsbacher &
Shroyer 1989). It is this type of findings that provides the psycholinguistic
underpinning for the idea of'grammar as a processing instructor'.

3.2 Relational coherence

So far, we have discussed examples of the way in which linguistic signals of

referential coherence affect text processing. We now move to signals of relational
coherence. In many approaches to discourse connectedness, coherence relations
are taken to account for the coherence in readers' cognitive text representation
(cf. Hobbs 1979; Mann & Thompson 1986; Sanders et al 1992; Sanders,
Spooren & Noordman 1993 ). Coherence relations are meaning relations which
connect two text segments (i.e. minimally clauses). Examples are relations like
 Text representation as an interface between language and its users n

CAUSE-CONSEQUENCE, LisT and PROBLEM-SOLUTION. These relations are concep-

tual and they can, but need not, be made explicit by linguistic markers. Below,
we will first focus on the second aspect of relational coherence, that on the level
of the surface code: linguistic markers such as connectives and signaling
phrases. After that we will move to the level of the meaning representation: the
nature of the relations themselves.
Ever since Ducrot (1980) and Lang (1984), there have been linguistic
accounts of connectives as operating instructions. The basic idea is that a
connective has the function of relating the content of the connected segments in
a specific type of relationship. Anscombre and Ducrot ( 1977), for instance,
analyze but as setting up an argumentative scale (for instance, the (un)desir-
ability ofJohn), with one segment tending towards the negative side of the scale
and the other towards the positive side:

(2) John is rich, but dumb.

In Chapter 9, Snoeck Henkemans explores the relationship between this type

of argumentative approaches to connectives and the text-linguistic ones that
were considered earlier above.
In his influential work on Mental Spaces, Fauconnier (1985, 1994) treats
connectives as one of the so-called space-builders, linguistic expressions that
typically establish new mental spaces. Mental spaces are mental constructs set
up to interpret utterances, "structured, incremental sets [ ... ] and relations
holding between them [ ... ], such that new elements can be added to them and
new relations established between their elements, (Fauconnier 1994, p. 16).
Other examples of space builders are prepositional phrases (In 1929, From her
point of view), adverbs (really, probably). A connective acting as a space-builder
is an if-then conditional, as in 'Ifl were a millionaire, my VW would be a Rolls•
or 'If he had listened to his mother, this criminal would be a Saint". Such
expressions if p then q set up a new mental space H in which a p and q hold. So,
if p is the space builder and in this new space my VW from the initial space
is identified with the Rolls in the new space (for the detailed analyses see
Fauconnier 1994, Chapters 3 and 4 and Sweetser 1996). Fauconnier argues that
the solution to some of the problems of traditional semantics, such as opacity,
presupposition and the like, falls out naturally from these mechanisms.
In the same vein, Spooren (1989) has argued that but-coordinations typi-
cally function to contrast conflicting information coming from different
perspectives, and that this may even affect the truth-conditional level For
instance, (3a) is possible, but (3b) is a contradiction (Spooren 1989, p. 69).
12 Ted Sanders and Wilbert Spooren

(3) a. Cassius Clay was shy, but Muhammed Ali wasn't.

b. Muhammed Ali was shy, but Muhammed Ali wasn't

This type of dynamic approach to connectives 'as processing instructors' is

becoming more and more important, not in the least because of the rise of
Cognitive Linguistics as a new branch on the linguistic tree. Is there any
psycholinguistic work showing the relevance of ideas like this?
Indeed, in various on-line processing studies the function of linguistic
markers is examined. These studies have primarily aimed at the investigation
of the processing role of the signals per se, rather than on more sophisticated
ideas like the exact working of 'space building'. The experimental work typi-
cally includes the comparison of reading times of identical textual fragments
with different linguistic signals preceding them. Recent studies on the role of
connectives and signalling phrases show that these linguistic signals affect the
construction of the text representation (cf. Deaton & Gernsbacher in press;
Millis & Just 1994; Noordman & Vonk 1997; Sanders & Noordman 2000).
Millis and Just (1994), for instance, investigated the influence of connec-
tives like because immediately after reading a sentence. When participants had
read two clauses that were either linked or not linked by a connective, they
judged whether a probe word had been mentioned in one of the clauses. The
recognition time to probes from the first clause was consistently faster when
the clauses were linked by a connective. The presence of the connective also led
to faster and more accurate responses to comprehension questions. These
results suggest that the connective does influence the representation immedi-
ately after reading.
Deaton and Gernsbacher (in press) combined on-line and off-line mea-
sures to investigate readers' use of because. They found that two causally related
clauses connected by because were read more rapidly than when they were
presented without the conjunction. When the clauses were conjoined by be-
cause, the second clauses were also recalled more frequently in a prompted
recall test.
Generally speaking, studies on the influence of linguistic markers on text
representation show a rather inconsistent pattern. Sometimes linguistic mark-
ers give rise to better structure in free recall (Meyer, Brandt & Bluth 1980), to
faster and more accurate reactions on a probe task, to faster and more accurate
responses to comprehension questions (Degand, Lefevre & Bestgen 1999;
Millis & Just 1994), and to better recall in a prompted recall task (Deaton &
Gemsbacher, in press), but they do not lead to more information recalled
 Text representation as an interface between language and its users 13

(Britton, Glynn, Meyer & Penland 1982; Meyer 1975). At the same time, on-
line data suggest that the presence of linguistic markers facilitates processing
(Britton et al. 1982; Deaton & Gemsbacher, in press).
Thus far, we have discussed the role of connectives and signaling phrases in
discourse processing. A preliminary conclusion might be that they can be
treated as linguistic markers which instruct readers in how to connect the new
discourse segment with the previous one (Britton 1994). In the absence of such
instructions readers have to determine for themselves what coherence relation
connects the incoming segment to the previous discourse. Such an inference
process requires additional cognitive energy and results in longer processing
times. If this idea has any validity, it implies that the coherence relations
themselves would have a major influence on discourse processing as well. One
might expect that the type of relation that connects two discourse segments, be
it causal, additive, contrastive etc., affects the discourse representation.
Here we move into another area where the combination of text linguistic
and discourse psychological insights has lead to significant progress: the cat-
egorization of coherence relations. In the last decade, a significant part of
research on coherence relations has focused on the question how the many
different sets of relations should be organized (Hovy 1990; Knott & Dale 1994;
Pander Maat 1998; Redeker 1990; Sanders 1997a). Sanders et al. ( 1992, 1993)
have started from the properties common to all relations, in order to define the
'relations among the relations', relying on the intuition that some coherence
relations are more alike than others. For instance, the relations in ( 4), (5) and
(6), all express (a certain type of) causality, whereas the ones in (7) and (8) do
not. Furthermore, a negative relation is expressed in (7), as opposed to all other
examples, and (8) expresses an enumeration or addition.

(4) The buzzard was looking for prey. The bird was soaring in the air for
hours.
(5) The bird has been soaring in the air for hours now. It must be a buzzard.
(6) The buzzard has been soaring in the air for hours now. Let's finally go
home!
(7) The buzzard was soaring in the air for hours. Yesterday we did not see it
all day.
(8) The buzzard was soaring in the air for hours. There was a peregrine
falcon in the area, too.

A dominant distinction in existing classification proposals is that between so-

called content, ideational, external or semantic relations on the one hand, and
14 Ted Sanders and Wilbert Spooren

presentational, internal and pragmatic relations, on the other hand. In the first
type of relations, segments are related because of their propositional content,
i.e. the locutionary meaning of the segments. They describe events that cohere
in the world. The relation in (9) can be interpreted as semantic because it
connects two events in the world; our knowledge allows us to relate the
segments as coherent in the world. A relation like (9) could be paraphrased as
"the cause in the first segment (Sl) leads to the fact reported in the second
segment (52)" (Sanders 1997a).

(9) The neighbours suddenly left for Paris last friday. So they are not at
home.
(10) The lights in their living room are out. So the neighbours are not at
home.

In (10) however, the two discourse segments are related because we under-
stand the second part as a conclusion from evidence in the first, and not
because there is a causal relation between two states of affairs in the world: It is
not because the lights are out that the neighbours are not at home. The causal
relation (10) could be paraphrased as "the description in 51 gives rise to the
conclusion or claim formulated in the 52." Hence, in the second type of
relation the discourse segments are related because of the illocutionary mean-
ing of one or both of the segments. The coherence relation concerns the speech
act status of the segments.
If this distinction is applied to the set of examples above, the causal relation
(4) is semantic, whereas (5) and (6) are pragmatic. This systematic difference
between types of relations is noted by many students of discourse coherence.
Still, there is quite a lot of discussion about the exact definition of a distinction
like this (see e.g., Bateman & Rondhuis 1997; Degand 1996; Hovy 1990; Knott
& Dale 1994; Knott 1996; Knott & Sanders 1998; Martin 1992; Moore &
Pollack 1992; Oversteegen 1997; Pander Maat 1998; Sanders 1997a; Sanders &
Spooren 1999 and several contributions to Couper-Kuhlen and Kortmann
(2000)). At the same time, several researchers have come up with highly similar
distinctions, and there seems to be basic agreement on the characteristics of the
prototypical relations (Sanders 1997a). Moreover, very similar distinctions
have been shown useful in describing the differential meaning of conjunctions
(Sweetser 1990). Also, the saliency of categorizations like these has been shown
in experiments in which, among other tasks, language users were asked to
judge the similarity of relations. Still, the discussion on this issue is clearly
continued in this volume, especially in Section 2 (Chapters 6 to 9).
 Text representation as an interface between language and its users 15

One of the emerging tendencies in recent linguistic research on the classifi-

cation of coherence relations is the relevance of the notions perspective and
subjectification. In several influential publications, Ducrot has stressed the
diaphonic nature of discourse. Even in monologual texts traces can be found of
other 'voices', information that is not presented as fact-like, but from a particu-
lar point-of-view, either the current speaker's (subjectified information, in the
terminology of}. Sanders & Spooren 1997) or another cognizer's (perspectiv-
ized information). Langacker has contributed much to the study ofthe linguistic
effects of notions like subjectification (e.g., Langacker 1990) and this notion also
seems valid for the study of coherence relations and connectives (Pander Maat
& Sanders 1999; Verhagen 1995, and some other contributions to Stein &
Wright 1995). Although perspective remains an elusive notion for linguistics
and psycholinguistics alike, Fauconnier's mental space framework seems
adequate in capturing this intriguing aspect of language (J. Sanders 1994; J.
Sanders & Redeker 1996, Verhagen 2000).
If categorizations of coherence relations and connectives indeed have cog-
nitive significance, they should show relevant in areas like language develop-
ment, both diachronic (grammaticalization, cf. Sweetser 1990; Traugott 1988;
Traugott & Heine 1991) and synchronic (language acquisition), and discourse
processing. In all three areas, substantial studies are under way (Evers-Vermeul
2000; Spooren & Sanders in prep.), and there already exists suggestive evi-
dence. Research on first language acquisition shows that the order in which
children acquire connectives shows increasing complexity, which can be ac-
counted for in terms of the relational categories mentioned above: ADDITIVES
before CAUSALS, POSITIVES before NEGATIVES (see Spooren, Sanders & Visser
1994; Spooren 1997). And in text processing, there is work on the role of
(different types of) coherence relations in the construction of a meaning
representation. However, at first sight, results of experimental studies on that
issue provide a less dear picture than the one for the role of linguistic markers,
especially when it concerns expository rather than narrative texts. Perhaps this
situation is largely due to the fact that it is difficult to design reading experi-
ments in which coherence relations or text structures are varied in a succesful
and independent way, while at the same time avoiding the use of ill-formed
texts (what Graesser, Millis, and Zwaan 1997, have called "textoids").
Nevertheless, the idea that coherence relations affect text processing does
get support from results of processing studies. Several studies suggest a pro-
cessing difference between CAUSAL and non-CAUSAL relations. For instance,
causally related events in short narratives are recalled better (Black & Bern
16 Ted Sanders and Wilbert Spooren

1981; Trabasso & Van den Broek 1985; Trabasso & Sperry 1985). Keenan,
Baillet and Brown ( 1984) and Myers, Shinjo and Duffy ( 1987) demonstrated
that the effect of causal connectedness on memory for sentences is greatest for
moderate levels of causality. Also, causally related sentences are read faster
(Haberlandt & Bingham 1978), and the reading time decreases when the
causality increases (Keenan et al. 1984, Myers et al. 1987).
Fewer studies exist for expository text. One example is a study by Meyer
and Freedle (1984). They claimed that differences exist in the amount of
organization of different types of text structure. The better organizing types are
CoMPARISON, CAUSATION and PROBLEM-SOLUTION, whereas COLLECTION is a
weaker organizing type. These structure types are rather similar to the often
distinguished types of coherence relations. In a free recall experiment, Meyer
and Freedle expected readers to reproduce more information from better
organized types than from less organized ones. The results show that recall of
the CAUSATION and COMPARISON passages was indeed superior to the recall of
the coLLECTION passage. 3 However, there are some problems with the Meyer
and Freedle study, see Horowitz (1987) and Sanders & Noordman (2000) for
further details.
Sanders and Noordman (2000) embedded a similar text segment in two
different contexts. In one case it was a Solution to a Problem, in the second case
the same segment was part of an addition. It was found that PROBLEM-SOLU-
TION relations lead to faster processing, better verification and superior recall.
The authors conclude that the processing of a text segment depends on the
relation it has with preceding segments. Perhaps the most interesting finding in
this experiment is the contrast in the effect of the two independent variables:
linguistic markers (implicit or explicit) and type relations (PROBLEM-SOLU-
TION or LIST). Explicit marking of the relations resulted in faster processing,
but did not affect recall. However, verification data concerning the representa-
tion immediately after reading, show an effect of the linguistic marker. This
finding is quite similar to the effect Millis and Just (1994) found for the
influence of because.
Hence, it can be concluded that the relational marker has an effect during
on-line processing, but that its influence decreases over time. This contrasts
with the effect of the coherence relation, which is also manifest in the recall.
This contrast is similar to another frequently observed finding in language
comprehension: initially a reader or listener constructs the surface representa-
tion of a sentence, but after a short time interval only the meaning or gist of the
message is retained. Sachs ( 1967) found this effect for the form and meaning of
 Text representation as an interface between language and its users 17

sentences which participants had to identify as identical or different. Results

like these strongly support the idea that coherence relations are an indissoluble
part of the cognitive representation itself, whereas linguistic markers like con-
nectives and signaUing phrases are merely expressions of these relations, which
guide the reader in selecting the right coherence relation. This conclusion is
highly compatible to a view on coherence in which linguistic markers, as part
of the surface code, 'guide' the reader towards a coherent text representation
(cf. Gemsbacher & Giv6n 1995; Graesser et al. 1997; Noordman & Vonk
1998).
So far, we have presented an overview of text-linguistic and psycholinguis-
tic work on referential and relational coherence. This overview might suggest
discourse processing to depend entirely on text characteristics such as the
linguistic markers of referential and relational coherence. That is not the case.
It is rather plausible that the role of coherence and its linguistic markers
interacts with 'reader factors' like interestingness of materials (Spooren,
Mulder & Hoeken 1998), domain knowledge (Birkmire 1985; McNamara &
Kintsch 1996), topic complexity (Spyridakis & Standal 1987) reader's goals
(Noordman et al. 1992) and verbal ability (Meyer, Young & Bartlett 1989). We
are convinced that the interaction of such reader's characteristics with text-
structural properties are prime issues for further research on text processing
(see also Kintsch 1998).
However, the focus of this chapter, and in fact, of this entire volume, is on
gaining further insight into the role of coherence and text structure itsel£ In
many discourse psychological studies on the interaction of textual and reader's
factors, the coherence of passages is varied by manipulating many different
textual aspects of coherence at the same time, such as adding elaborative
information, identification of anaphoric references, and even supplying back-
ground information. As a result, this type of research has often conflated
coherence per se and various other textual aspects that potential influence
coherence. As we have argued above, we think it is crucial for the further
progress of the field, that we get a better grip on the linguistic factors that
determine the cognitive discourse representation. This can only be achieved by
a further cross-fertilization of the fields of text linguistics and discourse psy-
chology. A good iUustration of this point concerns the role of relational mark-
ers of text structure. It has been argued above that signaling phrases and
connectives make existing relations explicit. This also implies that the use of
the markers is bound to restrictions: not every connective can express every
relation. In recent text-linguistic work we are beginning to understand what
18 Ted Sanders and Wilbert Spooren

these restrictions are and how they interplay with the meaning expressed by the
connected segments {cf. Knott & Dale 1994; Pander Maat & Sanders 2000 and
several contributions to Risselada & Spooren 1998). It is this type of insights
that underlines the importance of further cooperation of text linguists and
psycholinguists working on discourse (Sanders 1997b).

4- The coherence of this volume

What can readers expect of this volume? The collected chapters typically
present a cross-disciplinary account of text representation, by both linguists
and psycholinguists. This implies that linguistic analyses of textual characteris-
tics ultimatdy aim at accounting for the cognitive interpretation they can
receive. At the same time, psycholinguistic studies focus on the relevance of text
characteristics for theories of text processing, where text processing concerns
both production and interpretation. An important benefit of this combination
of text linguistics and psycholinguistics, and of production and understanding
is that we will encounter various methodologies, which are complementary:
linguistic analysis, text analysis, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics,
argumentation analysis, and the experimental psycholinguistic study of text
processing. A final focus of this book is the comparison and further testing of
linguistic and processing theories of text representation.
The following 12 chapters are divided in four sections. Section 1 deals with
referential coherence in text and text representation, and especially with acces-
sibility: how can the notion of varying accessibility explain for different refer-
ential forms, and what is the evidence for such a dynamic account of the
cognitive representations language users have?
In Section 2 focus shifts from referential to relational coherence in text and
text representation, when the classification of coherence rdations and connec-
tives is discussed in a closely connected cluster of chapters, combining various
theoretical approaches (from Relevance Theory to Argumentation Theory and
cognitive accounts of coherence relations) and different empirical methods
(from text-analysis to reading experiments).
Section 3 focuses on the cognitive representations of discourse and its
relation to knowledge representations: how are they related? How large is the
role of linguistic factors?
Finally, Section 4 discusses an issue typically neglected in the previous
sections: when coherence is said to exist, it exists between something, for
 Text representation as an interface between language and its users 19

instance, discourse units or text segments. But how are these segments defined?
And when we distinguish between different linguistic levels of representation
(word, clause, sentence, paragraph), do we know that these levels have any
psychological validity?
Together, the chapters in these four sections present an overview of a
growing field of interest, at the intersection of linguistics and psychology, the
study of a phenomenon that is crucial to our behavior because it is the mostly
used vehicle of communication: that of text and its cognitive representation.

Notes

1.More radical in that radical conversation analysists deny the possibility of attributing any
meaning to an utterance without regard of its context.
1..Stricdy speaking there is no logical connection between dynamic systems and incremen-
tal systems, in that dynamic systems can be constructed that are not incremental and
incremental systems that are not dynamic. Yet in every serious language interpretation
system that we know of the two go together.
3· However, there are some problems with the Meyer and Freedle study, see Horowitz
( 1987) and Sanders and Noordman (2000) for further details.

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 SECTION 1

Accessibility in text and text processing

Both in modeling discourse structure and in processing studies, accessing

referents and the linguistic coding of accessibility are central issues. The three
chapters in this section show that these phenomena need to be studied from a
linguistic and a psycholinguistic angle. In Chapter 2, Ariel discusses the lin-
guistic means of reference to discourse entities. Her central claim, based,
among others, on corpus analysis, is that language users do not arbitrarily
switch between different referential forms, such as pronouns and full NPs, but
that they show a systematic pattern. As in her earlier work, Ariel argues that the
form of referential expressions can be explained by means of accessibility
theory: the less accessible a referent is, the more elaborate the referential marker
used by the language user. She gives an overview of her own Accessibility
Theory, re-explaining aspects that have sometimes been misunderstood, and
elaborating it with new findings. Then, her theory is compared to other ac-
counts of reference. She explicitly addresses the issue of the cognitive motiva-
tion behind the theory, and discusses the relationship with psycholinguistic
work on anaphoric reference.
In Chapter 3, Gaddy, Van den Broek and Sung use a typically psychologi-
cal framework to model allocation of attention in what they call the Landscape
Model of Reading. The model addresses the issue how various text characteris-
tics (linguistic, discourse-structural) guide the reader's attention during read-
ing and how they affect the mental representations readers construct of the
discourse. The referential forms studied by Ariel (see Chapter 2) are one of
these textual devices determining the workings of the model. The authors
claim that theirs is an adequate model of the on-line reading process. The
chapter once again underlines the importance of the notion of 'activation' as
an explanatory concept in understanding the reading process and its result: a
coherent mental representation of the information expressed in the text.
Activation is also a key concept in Chapter 4, by Giora and Balaban. This
chapter deals with accessing literal and non-literal (or metaphorical) lexical
meaning in text production, such as the boys' fight in the schoolyard (literal) vs.
the union's fight against the government (non-literal). On the basis of experi-