Translation of discourse connectives varies more in human translations than in machine translations. Building on Murray’s (1997) continuity hypothesis and Sanders’ (2005) causality-by-default hypothesis we investigate whether expectedness influences the degree of implicitation and explicitation of discourse relations. We manually analyze how source text connectives are translated, and where con...

Abstract While there is a substantial amount of evidence for language processing being highly incremental and predictive process, we still know relatively little about how top-down discourse based expectations are combined with bottom-up information such as connectives. The present article reports on three experiments investigating this question using different methodologies (visual world parad...

We propose a framework to model human comprehension of discourse connectives. Following the Bayesian pragmatic paradigm, we advocate that discourse connectives are interpreted based on a simulation of the production process by the speaker, who, in turn, considers the ease of interpretation for the listener when choosing connectives. Evaluation against the sense annotation of the Penn Discourse ...

We develop a doubly exponential decision procedure for the satisfiability problem of guarded separation logic —a novel fragment featuring user-supplied inductive predicates, Boolean connectives, and separating including restricted (guarded) versions negation, magic wand, septraction. Moreover, we show that dropping guards any preceding connectives leads to an undecidable fragment. further apply...

The paper presents a preliminary study on discourse connectives (DC) in Czech. Aiming to build a computerized language corpus capturing discourse relations in Czech, we base our observations on current foreign projects with the same purpose. In this study, first, the different methods of linguistic analysis of the discourse structure and discourse connectives are described, next, the nature and...

Abstract Connectives such as however and since play an important role for marking coherence relations in discourse therefore are crucial reading comprehension, which turn is a strong predictor of academic success. Most research on the acquisition connectives targeted younger children. Yet there evidence that connective development extends well into adolescence even adult speakers have difficult...

Logical connectives, such as "AND", "OR", "IF. THEN", and "IF AND ONLY IF" are ubiquitous in both language and cognition; however, reasoning with logical connectives is error-prone. We argue that some of these errors may stem from people's tendency to minimize the number of possibilities compatible with logical connectives and to construct a "minimalist" one-possibility representation. As a res...