Referential and Relational Discourse Coherence in Adults and Children

Natalia Gagarina, Renate Musan, Natalia Gagarina, Renate Musan

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781501509995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book combines studies on referential as well as relational coherence and includes approaches to written and to spoken language, to production and to comprehension, to language specific and to cross-linguistic issues, to monolingual, bilingual and L2-acquisition. The theoretical issues and empirical findings discussed are of importance not only for theoretical linguistics, but also have a broad potential of practical implication.

Part 1:Relational coherence

Angelika Becker, Valentina Cristante and Renate Musan

The comprehension of coherence relations in expository texts at the age of 10 and 12

Note: This paper presents results of the project DFG MU3056/1-1 that was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft 2011-2013.

Angelika Becker

Renate Musan, University of Osnabrück, Neuer Graben 40, 49074 Osnabrück, email: [email protected]

Valentina Cristante, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1, 60323 Frankfurt, email: [email protected]

Abstract: The ability to understand coherence relations like cause/result between parts of texts is crucial for the comprehension of texts. The present study investigates how well students of grade 4 and grade 6 manage the construction of coherence in expository texts. Performance differences in comprehending additive, causal, contrastive, and temporal anteriority relations suggest a specific line of development: After an early phase which does not show significant differences in dealing with the four relations, there is first progress in constructing causal relations and, after a short delay, in constructing adversative relations. The performance concerning additive and temporal anteriority relations remains on a comparatively low level. What seems to be crucial for the developmental progress is the relevance of relations for the meaning of the text and – especially for temporal anteriority relations – the sequence of propositions. Not all text recipients profit from the presence of connectives to the same degree, least of all weak readers.

1Text comprehension and coherence relations

Comprehending texts implies being able to construe content-related connections and a coherent mental representation of the facts conveyed by the text. Coherence relations – i.e. relations like cause/result, problem/solution or contrast – are a particularly crucial aspect of coherence. Texts may contain signals for construing coherence relations, i.e. connectives like because, but or before, in variable degrees. When such explicit signals are lacking, recipients have to imply them. The present study deals with the question of how well 4th grade and 6th grade children manage to mentally construe certain coherence relations in expository texts, how their ability to do this develops, and what kind of role explicit marking of coherence relations by connectives plays.

Researchers have suggested various inventories of coherence relations (cf. Asher and Lascarides 2003; Mann and Thompson 1988; Martin 1992). The present study investigates four specific relations that belong to a generally assumed core of relations: additive, adversative, causal, and temporal anteriority relations.

One may safely assume that these relations constitute differing challenges for text processing. Sanders, Spooren and Noordman (1992, 1993) present an account of cognitive complexity of coherence relations. They classify coherence relations using four basic cognitive concepts:

–A relation is either “causal“ or “additive“. This corresponds to the intuition that a relation is either “weakly connective“ (additive) or “strongly connective“ (causal). Temporal relations are classified as additive.

–A relation is either “positive“ or “negative“.

–A relation is either “semantic“ or “pragmatic“.2

–The sequence of text segments combined by a coherence relation is either iconic (e.g. cause/result) or non-iconic (result/cause).

Based on this classification, Spooren and Sanders (2008) developed assumptions concerning the complexity of coherence relations, among them the following ones:

–Additive relations are less complex than causal ones.

–Negative relations are more complex than positive ones.

–Iconic sequences are less complex than non-iconic ones.

Regarding the complexity of processing the relations investigated in this study, one may hence arrive at the assumption that, according to some criteria, additive relations may be viewed as cognitively most simple among the four relations of the present study.

Additive relations are prototypically marked by und (‘and’). However, not every occurrence of und corresponds to an additive relation (Czech, this volume). But when expressing an additive relation, und presupposes that the combined propositions are compatible and that they can be bundled by superordinate criteria (Lang 1991). For the following example, for instance, the superordinate criterion may be “outer appearance”:

(1)	The moose is 2.5 to 3.2m long and its antlers are formed like shovels.

Adversative or contrastive relations establish a contrast between two states of affair. Contrast is prototypically expressed by aber (’but’). As it is the case with additive relations, the combined propositions are compatible, but the feature of bundling, which is positively specified with additive relations, is negative in the case of adversative relations (Breindl 2004; Brauße 1998): the propositions cannot be bundled with respect to a superordinate criterion (Breindl 2004). According to the criteria of complexity of Spooren and Sanders (2008), adversative relations are more complex than additive relations because of this negative feature. Moreover, the relation is even more complex, because contrast can be established in many different ways. Stede (2004: 282) lists eight of possibly more subtypes of contrastive relations, among them the following two (examples after Stede):

(2)	a.	Information about an unexpected correlation:
		In July we went to the Canaries, but we were freezing as if at the South Pole.
	b.	Neutral comparison of two facts:
		Munich has a great soccer club. In Berlin the baseball players are better.

Some authors doubt that contrastive relations exist on the level of true states of affairs, e.g. Breindl (2004), Brauße (1998) and Stede (2004). Stede (2004: 281) argues as follows: If contrast in the relevant sense existed ’in the world’, then the notion would have little content, because diversity exists everywhere; rather, text producers present diversity of objects or situations relative to the text and its purpose. As Brauße (1998) shows, this is also the reason why one cannot always derive from the meaning of context-free propositions whether they are additively or adversatively related to each other. Hence it seems likely that the mental construction of adversative relations presupposes deeper text comprehension than that found with additive relations.

Causal relations include according to recent proposals all relations that can be derived from conditional relationships (Duden Grammatik 2005; Waßner 2004). The most important markers of causality in German are weil, denn and da (‘because’). Causal relations connect propositions with different roles, e.g. cause/reason vs. result/effect. According to Spooren and Sanders (2008), causal relations are ‘strongly connecting’ and more complex than additive relations. A causal relation always implies an additive relation, because in both cases the respective pairs of propositions are asserted.

However, there are also indicators that causal relations can be processed very well: Researchers often assume that text comprehension is primarily oriented at the construction of causal relationships (van den Broek 1990, 1994; Trabasso and Suh 1993). Causality can generally be viewed as a crucial cognitive category structuring human perception and experience (Noordman and de Blijzer 2000). The representation of causal relations is directly anchored in experiencing the world, in observing the repeated sequencing of events. Even children are already constantly confronted with such experiences: When grabbing something hot, it hurts. This early orientation towards causal relationships may still be of influence in the comprehension of expository texts, even if the relationships are not directly accessible to immediate perception. Hence, one can imagine that the construction of causal coherence – at least in deep text processing – already takes priority over additive and adversative relations in childhood. But the ease of processing a causal relation also depends on factors like the complexity of the text topic and the relevant knowledge of the recipient. Noordman, Vonk and Kempff (1992) investigated the processing of causal relations in challenging expository texts indicated by because. The following sentence from their study is frequently cited:

(3)	Chlorine compounds make good propellants because they react with almost no other substances. (Noordman, Vonk and Kempff 1992: 573).

The causal relation here requires inferences and the activation of subject-specific knowledge. The subjects, who were not chemistry specialists, were not able to construct the connection despite its explicit marking.

Temporal coherence is in a certain sense more basic than additive, adversative and causal coherence. Temporal connections and time structure are largely obligatorily expressed in every clause, especially by the use of tenses. Temporal relations – simultaneity, anteriority, and posteriority – can be marked by connectives. The relation of anteriority (terminology according to Blühdorn 2004), which is investigated in the present study, can be expressed by bevor and zuvor (‘before’). A connective like bevor indicates that the situation of the matrix clause is located anterior and proximal to the situation expressed by the bevor-clause. When anteriority is not indicated by a connective, it can often be inferred from the tenses used in the sentence, e.g. past perfect combined with present perfect. Such combinations of tenses also often occur in sentences containing bevor; hence, the relation will be indicated twice. Following Spooren and Sanders (2008), the processing complexity crucially depends on the sequence of the clauses: iconic sequences as in (4a) (first situation < second situation) can be processed more easily than non-iconic sequences as in (4b) (second situation < first situation).

(4)	a.	The animals look for sheltered places before hibernation begins.
	b.	Before hibernation begins, the animals ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Relational coherence
• Part 2: Referential coherence
• Index