Markedness and topic continuity in discourse processing

Abstract

Two experiments are presented in support of the hypothesis that various syntactic constructions hierarchize along a continuum which codes the degree of topic continuity in a discourse. In the first experiment subjects were asked to rewrite two short sentences as a single long sentence. They were allowed to rephrase the second sentence to make their new, combined sentence sound natural. The form of the referent in the second sentence was found to depend on its continuity with the topic of the other sentence. Subjects tended to use unmarked linguistic forms in cases of high topic continuity and marked forms when there was a topic shift. In the second experiment subjects were asked to interpret discourse fragments which contained ambiguous referents. The less marked the form of the referent was, the more likely subjects were to interpret it as coreferential with the preceding topic.