Keynote speakers

Marion Fossard, University of Neuchâtel

"Discourse dynamics and reference markers: how do (different) speakers adjust their referential choices during a collaborative storytelling task? "

In a speech or oral narrative, the cognitive status of referents is rarely fixed once and for all. Rather, each referent varies in accessibility as discourse unfolds, influenced by both the presence and the prominence of other speech entities, causing the speaker to constantly (re) adjust his referential choices based on the level of accessibility of the targeted referent. If the linguistic context plays a major part in the choice of referential expressions used, other factors also intervene. The physical context of the task - in particular the role played by the visual information - as well as each individual speaker's cognitive resources are factors that modulate adjustment processes.

In this talk, we will present several results from a collaborative story telling task based on picture prompts. This task, conducted among speakers with various cognitive states (young, elderly, or Alzheimer's participants), shows that referential adjustment is a complex process that is observed at different levels of granularity: at the level of reference markers (indefinite, definite, pronouns) as well as content of the referential expression, and which recruits different cognitive skills in specific discourse moments.

The talk will be given in French.

Marjolijn H. Verspoor, University of Groningen

The dynamics of L2 referential cohesion over time

Taking a Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) perspective, I will trace the non-linear development of two high intermediate Chinese L2 writers of English over the course of 18 months. Pre-post holistic scores on text quality (Hou et al 2016) showed that an intact class did not make progress; still within the group some individual learners had made progress whereas others had not. From this class, one “good” learner and one “weak” learner were selected and their development over time was traced in detail to try to discover patterns of development that might explain in retrospect what contributed to their progress or stagnation. It appeared that the good learner had a coordinated linguistic system in which the different subsystems develop synchronously. The weaker learner, in contrast, appeared to have an uncoordinated system in which different subsystems showed a lot of variability and disparate developmental patterns.  In this talk, I will zoom in especially on the role of referential cohesion (Givon 1983 and 1992)--in particular the use of anaphora--to see to what extent it may correlate with text quality and to what extent it does develop in the “good learner” but not in the weak one. The main point of the paper though is to show that variability (intra-individual changes over time) and variation (inter-individual differences) are to be expected and that not any single specific measure can account for development.   

Givón, T. (1983). Topic continuity in discourse: an introduction. In Givón, T (Eds), Topic Continuity In Discourse: A Quantitative Cross-Language Study (pp. 5-41). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Givón, T. (1992). The grammar of referential coherence as mental processing instructions. Linguistics, 30, 5-55.

Hou, J., Verspoor, M., & Loerts, H. (2016). An exploratory study into the dynamics of Chinese L2 writing development. Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics, 5(1), 65-96.

Verspoor, M., De Bot, K., & Lowie, W. (Eds.). (2011). A dynamic approach to second language development: Methods and techniques (Vol. 29). John Benjamins Publishing.