Recency affects how accessible referents are, but the effect of recency is mediated by the structure of the discourse. In a series of four pronoun resolution experiments, we examine how the accessibility of referents is impacted by the form of subsequent discourse segments, investigating effects of syntactic subordination, the presence of explicit coherence markers, and typographic and prosodic boundaries. Our findings indicate that syntactic subordination, connectives, and typographic boundaries all additively contribute to whether an intervening clause is perceived as less or more conceptually integrated, and that this affects how strongly that clause blocks access to a preceding referent. However, the type of prosodic boundary was found to interact with syntax in an unforeseen way: only with syntactic subordination did a high boundary seem to increase the perception of the intervening clause as integrated, but not with coordination. Our results speak to the question of how the mental representation of a discourse is affected by the specific form of the discourse, and call for a reconsideration of intonational boundaries as integratedness cues.

In this paper, we address the issue of explainability in a transformer-based subjectivity regressor trained on native English speakers’ judgements. The main goal of this work is to test how the regressor’s predictions, and therefore native speakers’ intuitions, relate to theoretical accounts of subjectivity. We approach this goal using two methods: a top-down manual selection of theoretically defined subjectivity features and a bottom-up extraction of top subjective and objective features using the LIME explanation method. The explainability of the subjectivity regressor is evaluated on a British news dataset containing sentences taken from social media news posts and from articles on the websites of the same news outlets. Both methods provide converging evidence that theoretically defined subjectivity features, such as emoji, evaluative adjectives, exclamations, questions, intensifiers, and first person pronouns, are prominent predictors of subjectivity scores. Thus, our findings show that the predictions of the regressor, and therefore native speakers’ perceptions of subjectivity, align with subjectivity theory. However, an additional comparison of the effects of different subjectivity features in author text and the text of cited sources reveals that the distinction between author and source subjectivity might not be as salient for naïve speakers as it is in the theory.

The Cognitive approach to Coherence Relations (Sanders, Spooren, & Noordman, 1992) was originally proposed as a set of cognitively plausible primitives to order coherence relations, but is also increasingly used as a discourse annotation scheme. This paper provides an overview of new CCR distinctions that have been proposed over the years, summarizes the most important discussions about the operationalization of the primitives, and introduces a new distinction (disjunction) to the taxonomy to improve the descriptive adequacy of CCR. In addition, it reflects on the use of the CCR as an annotation scheme in practice. The overall aim of the paper is to provide an overview of state-of-the-art CCR for discourse annotation that can form, together with the original 1992 proposal, a comprehensive starting point for anyone interested in annotating discourse using CCR.

Temporal information is one of the prominent features that determine the coherence in a discourse. That is why we need an adequate way to deal with this type of information during discourse annotation. In this paper, we will argue that temporal order is a relational rather than a segment-specific property, and that it is a cognitively plausible notion: temporal order is expressed in the system of linguistic markers and is relevant in both acquisition and language processing. This means that temporal relations meet the requirements set by the Cognitive approach of Coherence Relations (CCR) to be considered coherence relations, and that CCR would need a way to distinguish temporal relations within its annotation system. We will present merits and drawbacks of different options of reaching this objective and argue in favor of adding temporal order as a new dimension to CCR.