Abstract
The introduction of new referents into discourse has traditionally been regarded as a major challenge to language processing, for which speakers deploy specific syntactic configurations, guided by the speaker’s assessment of the recipient’s state of mind (‘recipient design’). In this paper we probe these assumptions against discourse data from nine languages. We find little evidence for specialized syntactic configurations accommodating new referents; the only notable exception is the association of new reference with direct objects, suggests that linking new referents to already established discourse frames through a transitive construction is preferable to isolating them in an intransitive one. Where specific intransitive predicates are indeed found to host new referents, we find this to be motivated primarily by semantic considerations. Contrary to long-held assumptions, we conclude that the cognitive challenge of referent introduction is only weakly reflected in morphosyntax; instead, discourse production is most efficient when new referents are integrated seamlessly with content-driven demands of the narration.
Funding source: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Award Identifier / Grant number: 323627599
Funding source: Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language
Award Identifier / Grant number: CE140100041
Funding source: Australian Research Council DECRA
Award Identifier / Grant number: DE120102017
Acknowledgment
The research reported here was made possible through the following grants: a DFG grant (Sachbeihilfe, DFG project no. 323627599), Schnell’s post-doctoral position at the University of Melbourne within the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CE140100041), and Schnell’s Australian Research Council DECRA grant (DE120102017). For acknowledgments relating to individual corpus compilation and annotation projects, please refer to the Multi-CAST website.[10] We thank the audiences at the CoEDL Seminar, Australian National University, 11 November 2018, and the Workshop Comparative Corpus Linguistics: New Perspectives and Applications, Tallinn, 31 August to 1 September 2018, as well as one anonymous reviewer and the two editors of this special issue, Natalia Levshina and Steve Moran, for their constructive feedback. Their advice has greatly improved our work on the questions examined here. All remaining errors are our own responsibility.
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Research funding: The research reported here was made possible through the following grants: a DFG grant (Sachbeihilfe, DFG project no. 323627599), Schnell’s post-doctoral position at the University of Melbourne within the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CE140100041), and Schnell’s Australian Research Council DECRA grant (DE120102017).
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The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0064).
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