Data: dijous 17 de desembre del 2020

Hora: 12.00 h

Accés: en línia, amb Collaborate (enllaç:

eu.bbcollab.com/guest/cbd918ec0de7403f94ba44b0a67b7a2d)

Resum:

Variation in referential form, such as the choice between a pronoun “she” and a name “Ruth Bader Ginsburg”, is an important component of language use. While evidence has accumulated that more predictable words are more likely to be reduced, there is a long-standing debate regarding whether more reduced referring expressions (e.g., pronouns) are more frequently produced to refer to more predictable referents. This study contributes to this debate with new evidence in two aspects.

1) Rhetorical relation-driven predictability: while the cases that have been studied in previous psycholinguistic studies have been fairly restricted to some particular verbs types, this study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt of broadening the empirical base with expectation biases primarily driven by rhetorical relations;

2) Natural language in corpus: instead of using constructed language to elicit production, we make use of natural coreference chains that can be automatically retrieved from corpora developed in coreference resolution research. The results from our study provide evidence for a rhetorical relation-driven predictability bias. In addition, no evidence has been found that predictability affects referential choice throughout the study.