Givenness, procedural meaning and connectives: The case of French puisque

Zufferey, Sandrine (2014). Givenness, procedural meaning and connectives: The case of French puisque. Journal of pragmatics, 62(1), pp. 121-135. Elsevier 10.1016/j.pragma.2013.09.022

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I argue that the communication of given information is part of the procedural instructions conveyed by some connectives like the French puisque. I submit in addition that the encoding of givenness has cognitive implications that are visible during online processing. I assess this hypothesis empirically by comparing the way the clauses introduced by two French causal connectives, puisque and parce que, are processed during online reading when the following segment is ‘given’ or ‘new’. I complement these results by an acceptability judgement task using the same sentences. These experiments confirm that introducing a clause conveying given information is a core feature characterizing puisque, as the segment following it is read faster when it contains given rather than new information, and puisque is rated as more acceptable than parce que in such contexts. I discuss the implications of these results for future research on the description of the meaning of connectives.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of French Language and Literature

UniBE Contributor:

Zufferey, Sandrine

Subjects:

800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 840 French & related literatures
400 Language > 440 French & related languages

ISSN:

0378-2166

Publisher:

Elsevier

Submitter:

Sandrine Zufferey

Date Deposited:

25 Apr 2016 11:23

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 14:53

Publisher DOI:

10.1016/j.pragma.2013.09.022

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.78531

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/78531

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