Public science communication should be as clear and simple as possible, giving unequivocal answers to the questions the general public is interested in. The issues of clarity and certainty are particularly heightened in cases where members of the public are directly affected by what science has to say on a particular issue, such as the precautions to be taken during a pandemic. At the same time, however, results of state-of-the-art scientific research often do not translate into straightforward answers to such questions. Rather, scientists often see the need to carefully distinguish between different degrees of certainty with which an answer to a particular query can be given. Importantly, hedging the degree of certainty of one's utterances is not specific to science communication, but is a general feature of linguistic communication. Hence, the question arises whether and to what extent public science communication differs from everyday conversation with regard to the employment of hedging strategies, such as using markers for distinguishing different levels of certainty. The current study explores some of the issues that arise when attempting to answer this question on the basis of (German) corpus data, comparing the use of adjectives and adverbials as certainty markers in the Coronavirus-Update Podcast with their use in other types of spoken linguistic interactions as documented in the FOLK corpus. We begin with a short exposition of how distinctions in certainty are linguistically communicated, focusing on a selection of adjectives and adverbials used in epistemic functions. These adjectives and adverbials indeed show a higher overall frequency, but there are differences with regard to certainty levels: expressions indicating a low or a high degree of certainty show similar frequencies in both corpora, while expressions indicating a mid level of certainty appear to be more frequent in public science discourse. Somewhat surprisingly, we do not find support for (the relevance of) the distinction between subjective and objective uses of adverbials and adjectives as epistemic expressions, which plays a major role in the literature. Objective uses of these expressions are hardly attested at all.

Abstract Reference to an implicit argument in a bridging context is made by definite determiner phrases (DPs) ( a book... the author ), and it is assumed that demonstrative DPs are not felicitous in such contexts ( a book... #that author ). However, the literature reports bridging contexts with demonstrative DPs. We argue that the recognitional use of demonstratives, first described in Himmelmann ( 1996 , 1997 ), can license demonstrative DPs in such contexts. Bridging contexts rely on general knowledge, making definite DPs the default in the “larger situational use” ( Hawkins 1978 ). We argue that demonstrative DPs are possible in such contexts if they signal special shared knowledge between speaker and hearer, i.e. if they are recognitional. Two rating tasks with evaluative adjectives provide evidence for the recognitional function of bridging demonstratives.

Differential Object Marking (DOM) is a cross-linguistic phenomenon in which the overt marking of direct objects of certain transitive verbs exhibits distinct morpho-syntactic properties. In Turkish, DOM is realized by the accusative suffix -(y)I and is considered to be determined by parameters such as referentiality/specificity, affectedness, and topicality. In addition, Enç argues that discourse-linking, which is a backward-looking discourse function, is another relevant parameter. In this paper, we investigate whether DOM also serves a forward-looking discourse function, which has remained underexplored. Using corpus studies and offline experiments, we investigate the forward discourse function of DOM in Turkish by analyzing the frequency of anaphoric expressions referring to the direct object with vs. without DOM. Corpus data show that non-modified human indefinite direct objects with DOM are taken up significantly more often in the subsequent discourse than those without DOM. However, forced-choice and paragraph continuation tasks do not support these observations. We evaluate various parameters that might contribute to the discourse prominence of direct objects with DOM and those that might mask such effects. We conclude that there is some corpus evidence that DOM contributes to a forward-looking discourse function, though our experimental methods may be inadequate to capture it.

Every utterance in discourse we produce arises from the interaction of numerous cognitive functions, such as semantic memory, where we store the meanings of words, executive function and working memory as required for maintenance of a discourse goal, and social cognitive abilities, such as mind-reading capacity as required for tuning what we say to what others know or believe. In this way, a single utterance potentially integrates very different cognitive capacities into a basic discourse processing unit. This suggests that discourse processing and management is a very rich phenomenon that requires a multidimensional approach. We propose that a model of discourse management is comprised of three primary components that interact synergistically: (i) dynamicity, (ii) predictability, and (iii) meta-representationality. Cognitive functions play a pivotal role in the underlying processes, contributing to the development and unfolding of discourse. Understanding the correspondence between individual differences in discourse management (i.e., discourse perception and production) and cognitive functions can shed light on the intricate relationship between language and cognition in discourse management, as well as the appropriate psychometric measures to address this complex interaction. This narrative review presents aspects of discourse management, psychometric measures to comprehensively address these aspects. We close with a discussion of challenges and open questions.

The same proposition can be encoded e.g. as a main clause or as a subordinate clause in a complex sentence. Such structural configurations influence whether and how a proposition is subsequently built upon in the discourse, e.g. by anaphoric referral. It is an open question to what extent anaphoric reference to individuals and propositions works in the same way: are the same mechanisms responsible for whether a proposition can be referred to as for whether an individual referent can be referred to? Do they affect both similarly? We present three sets of paired anaphor resolution experiments in German manipulating the prominence relation between two competing entities: in each pair we tested the influence of how two clauses are structurally integrated on individual reference in one experiment, and on propositional reference in the other. The manipulations (syntactic configuration and typography) were the same in each pair, but between experiment pairs, we varied the type of discourse relation between the two clauses (backward causality, forward causality, violation of expectation). We find a basic pattern of correspondence between the prominence level of the proposition and of the individual referents, independent of the type of rhetorical relation between the two clauses. We propose that this is due to a process we dub Prominence Inheritance: individual referents "inherit" the relative prominence of the larger units they are part of. Our study investigates individual and propositional prominence in parallel for the first time, providing new insights into the differences and similarities between them, and into how structural and pragmatic factors impact accessibility and anaphor resolution. (c) 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

The French verb laisser (‘to let’) allows for two different syntactic constructions, an Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) construction and a Faire-Infinitive (FI) construction with a postverbal Causee, and for two different interpretations, authorize and not-intervene. According to previous studies (e.g. Kayne 1975), constructions are related to interpretations: the ECM can express intentionality, the FI cannot. In this paper, we explore a different hypothesis: the ECM construction is underspecified and allows for both interpretations, while the FI is restricted to the not-intervening interpretation. We provide empirical evidence from three distinct forced choice tasks in which participants had to match constructions and interpretations. The results reveal that, contrary to both early observations and our initial hypothesis, both constructions may allow for both interpretations, and variation depends less on the syntactic configuration than on semantic and pragmatic factors, namely on the lexical inferences triggered by the embedded verb and the authority relation between Causer and Causee expressed in the contexts.

The French verb laisser ('to let') allows for two different syntactic constructions, an Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) construction and a Faire - Infinitive (FI) construction with a postverbal Causee, and for two different interpretations, authorize and not -intervene . According to previous studies (e.g. Kayne 1975), constructions are related to interpretations: the ECM can express intentionality, the FI cannot. In this paper, we explore a different hypothesis: the ECM construction is underspecified and allows for both interpretations, while the FI is restricted to the not -intervening interpretation. We provide empirical evidence from three distinct forced choice tasks in which participants had to match constructions and interpretations. The results reveal that, contrary to both early observations and our initial hypothesis, both constructions may allow for both interpretations, and variation depends less on the syntactic configuration than on semantic and pragmatic factors, namely on the lexical inferences triggered by the embedded verb and the authority relation between Causer and Causee expressed in the contexts.

Causative constructions in Romance show complex variation regarding the case of the subject of the non-finite clause (causee) and to its position with respect to the main causative verb and the embedded non-finite verb. It has been argued that the variation reflects the diachronic evolution of the causative construction in Romance and also documents an ongoing process of further development. We present original empirical data from a comparative corpus of Bible translations that provide new insights into diachronic evolution as well as to the synchronic variation. Our comparative approach allows us to generalize over additional semantic and pragmatic parameters for the choice of a particular construction. Our data support the assumption of the extension of ECM from clitic to nominal causee constructions in French, but they do not support this for Italian. For Spanish we see some ECM constructions in the most recent translation only.

Spanish, like many other Romance and non-Romance languages, shows Differential Object Marking (DOM), i.e., some direct objects are morphologically marked by the prepositional marker a ‘to’, while others remain unmarked. The literature has proposed different sentential parameters in order to capture this variation (Fábregas 2013, among others), including topicality (see Leonetti 2004, Iemmolo 2010, among others). In addition, Laca (1995: 82f.) has argued that DOM also depends on discourse properties. She assumes that in Spanish the use of DOM with an indefinite direct object signals that more information about this object referent is to be expected in the upcoming discourse (see also Comrie 1981/1989). First empirical evidence for this hypothesis comes from DOM in Romanian (Chiriacescu & von Heusinger 2010). In this paper we explore the hypothesis that, in Spanish, human indefinite direct objects with DOM show more forward-looking potential than those without DOM. We present original results from two corpus studies and two paragraph continuation tasks. The corpus studies provide support for the discourse effect of DOM, while the paragraph continuation tasks do not, which might be due to the particular design of our experimental items. We evaluate the different parameters that contribute to the discourse prominence of a direct object with DOM and those that might mask such effects. We conclude that there is evidence that DOM contributes to discourse prominence, but that further studies are necessary.

In discourse processing, speakers collaborate toward a shared mental model by introducing discourse referents and picking them up with the adequate linguistic forms. Discourse referents compete with each other with respect to their prominence and their accessibility for pronouns. This study focuses on transitive sentences with proper names as subjects and indefinite noun phrases as second arguments, typically direct objects. An ambiguous pronoun in the subsequent sentence may access either referent of the first sentence. Various factors have been shown to influence pronoun resolution, including informativity (how informative is the phrase in which the referent is introduced? E.g., the waiter vs. the waiter at the entrance) and information status (is the referent given or new in the context?). While both factors have been independently shown to increase referent accessibility, our visual-world eye-tracking experiment shows an original and quite unexpected effect: informativity and information status interact when it comes to the accessibility of indefinite noun phrases: a higher degree of informativity increases accessibility when a referent is brand-new, but surprisingly decreases accessibility when a referent is inferred. We discuss a potential explanation for this surprising pattern in terms of a mismatch between the denotational type of the indefinite and the type required by the modification. We conclude that indefinites strongly interact with additional semantic, contextual and communicative parameters in establishing their referents.

This study, employing eye-tracking reading and sentence completion experiments, explores the impact of competing antecedents on the German demonstratives der and dieser. It challenges prior assumptions, revealing that in competitive alternative antecedent contexts, processing dieser initially posed challenges, indicating sensitivity to alternatives. Dieser exhibited less processing difficulties than der, potentially influenced by a register effect. Consistent with previous findings, in the offline task, references to the non-prominent entity were similar for both demonstratives, but our online experiment shows functional differences in cognitive processes between the two in reading. Our results suggest that Thematic Role accounts better explain antecedent preferences for der and dieser than Centering Theory.

German has two demonstrative pronouns: the der, die, das paradigm and the dieser, diese, dies(es) paradigm. Previous studies mainly compared the anaphoric use of der with the personal pronoun er and observed that der refers to less prominent antecedents. However, there are only very few studies that have investigated the differences between these two demonstrative pronouns. We hypothesize that they differ in signaling topic persistence and in accessing contrastive antecedents. We tested these hypotheses in short texts that manipulated the contrast of the antecedent by inducing the expression ‘in contrast to’ vs. ‘together with’ (e.g., the cellist in contrast to the flautist vs. the cellist together with the flautist). Results from our eye-tracking reading Experiment (Experiment 1), in which participants’ eye- movements were monitored while reading sentences, show that (i) readers preferred dieser when referring to the topic of a sentence, and (ii) dieser caused less processing difficulties than der in both contrast and no-contrast contexts. Our sentence completion Experiment (Experiment 2) also confirmed that der and dieser are both used for anaphoric reference to a topical antecedent. Collectively, our experiments provide evidence that dieser functions as inducing topic persistence. These results suggest that there is a need for further experimental investigation into the semantic factors and informational structures influencing the usage of demonstrative pronouns in German.

German has two demonstrative pronoun series: the short form der, die, das, and the long form dieser, diese, dieses. Both forms can be used anaphorically, and they contrast with the personal pronouns er, sie, es in that they refer to an antecedent that is less prominent at that point in the discourse when the discourse provides different potential antecedents. Demonstrative pronouns are typically used in the preverbal position in a German sentence, i.e., the topic position. Thus, they are assumed to be topic shifters (from a non-topical antecedent to the topical argument in the current sentence). However, der can be repeated, yielding topic chains, thus referring back to a topical antecedent, while this is not the case for dieser. In this article, we argue that der and dieser both contribute to topic management, but they do this in different ways: der is a marker of a sentence topic, while dieser is a marker of discourse topic shift. We present the results of two experiments that compare the use of personal pronouns with either demonstrative pronoun manipulating sentence topic or discourse topic. First, both experiments show that the personal pronoun is not sensitive to either type of topichood of its antecedent. Second, Experiment 1 shows that both demonstrative pronouns prefer a context where discourse topic and sentence topic are shifted. Third, Experiment 2 shows that only dieser prefers a context with a shifted discourse topic, but der is not sensitive to discourse topichood alone. We take the results as supporting our claim that the two demonstratives have different discourse functions: der marks a sentence topic, while dieser is a shifter (and marker) of the discourse topic.

Agents’ actions and intentions can be prompted or hindered in multiple ways. Across languages, verbs that lexicalize the causative primitives of CAUSE, ENABLE or PREVENT (Wolff & Song 2003) can help us understand the nature of agency, precisely because they involve multiple participants which are sometimes seen as being in a position of influencing each other via different types of relations. In this paper, we focus on the role of authority, intended as an influence that affects the choices available to a free agent with respect to the actions in service of their goal. We show that, while many causative verbs seem to imply the type of force relation between the participants in their lexical meaning, the French causative verb laisser is underspecified: the type of influence exerted by the two participants in a laisser relation is determined by the syntactic structure of the causative construction.

This article explores the relationship between affectedness and Differential Object Marking (DOM) of indefinite direct objects in Turkish and Uzbek. We argue that the distribution of DOM in the two Turkic languages is determined by the direct objects’ specificity and animacy as nominal semantic properties, and affectedness as a verbal semantic property associated with the direct object. We provide original empirical evidence from two forced-choice studies that investigate DOM along the parameters of animacy, affectedness, and telicity, and their interaction with each other. Our findings indicate that affectedness shapes the distribution of DOM in both Turkish and Uzbek, with an interesting variation in how it is instantiated and interacts with animacy. The findings do not confirm an impact of telicity as an independent factor driving overt case marking in the languages investigated. Rather, its influence on DOM stems from interaction with affectedness.

The article investigates the hypothesis that prominence phenomena on different levels of linguistic structure are systematically related to each other. More specifically, it is hypothesized that prominence relations in morphosyntax reflect, and contribute to, prominence management in discourse. This hypothesis is empirically based on the phenomenon of agentivity clines, i.e. the observation that the relevance of agentivity features such as volition or sentience is variable across different constructions. While some constructions, including German DO-clefts, show a strong preference for highly agentive verbs, other constructions, including German basic active constructions, have no particular requirements regarding the agentivity of the verb, except that at least one agentivity feature should be present. Our hypothesis predicts that this variable relevance of agentivity features is related to the discourse constraints on the felicitous use of a given construction, which in turn, of course, requires an explicit statement of such constraints. We propose an original account of the discourse constraints on DO-clefts in German using the 'Question Under Discussion' framework. Here, we hypothesize that DO-clefts render prominent one implicit question from a set of alternative questions available at a particular point in the developing discourse. This then yields a prominent question-answer pair that changes the thematic structure of the discourse. We conclude with some observations on the possibility of relating morphosyntactic prominence (high agentivity) to discourse prominence (making a Question Under Discussion prominent by way of clefting).