Processing causal and diagnostic uses of so
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2006/01/0048/000048Abstract
This study compares the processing of causal and diagnostic uses of the connective so. In an experiment measuring reading times, it is shown that diagnostic so con-structions, (e.g. Carl has been limping lately. So he was injured in the accident.) take longer to read than causal ones (e.g. Carl didn’t wear his seatbelt. So he was injured in the accident.). This difference is reduced in parallel constructions where so is absent. It is proposed that readers are strongly biased towards a default causal reading of so and therefore anticipate a consequence when they encounter so. In diagnostic constructions, since so is followed by an antecedent, processing is more effortful and complex because the default expectation has to be reversed.
References
Blakemore, D. 1988. ‘So’ as a constraint on relevance. In Kempson R. (ed.) 1988, Mental Representations: The interface between language and reality, 183-95. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Sanders, T., Spooren, W. and Noordman, L. 1992. Towards a taxonomy of discourse relations. Discourse Processes 15, 1-35.
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Copyright (c) 2006 Sharmaine Seneviratne (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
