Connective Ties in Discourse: Three Erp-studies on Causal, Temporal, and Concessive Connective Ties and Their Influence on Language Processing. Ii. Connective Ties

I. Introduction The task the reader of a text has to accomplish is to connect the sentences in that discourse, to construct a global representation of what the text is about. This involves not only understanding the separate sentences but also the making of connections (inferences) between the sentences. Previous research has found that the processing of single sentences as well as a multi-sentence discourse is incremental, with every element being integrated syntactically and semantically into the representation as it 'comes along', but that more complex operations that demand added resources can impede the understanding process (see for instance Mitchell, 1994 for an overview of sentence parsing theory and Carpenter, Miyake & Just, 1995, as well as Clifton & Duffy, 2001 for overviews of discourse processing). It has been shown that readers automatically attempt to make connections between two adjacent sentences, also called bridging inferences A text can however make successive bridging inferences possible and still be globally incoherent –and consequentially difficult to process –if the central theme of the text In other words, it is not only necessary for a reader to make connections between two sentences, but also to integrate all sentences into a global representation of the meaning of the discourse. This representation is called the mental model (Johnson-Laird, 1983) or situation model (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). It has been proposed that readers routinely keep track of several dimension in a text such as space, time, causality, involved characters, and motivation, and that shared dimensions between sentences are used in the construction of an integrated situation model There are a large number of lexical elements that have the function of stating precisely which relation is present between two sentences: connective ties such as deshalb and darum (therefore), danach and hinterher (afterwards), and trotzdem and dennoch (nevertheless). These six adverbial connective ties have in common that they must be the sentence-initial element of their internal argument, the second sentence. Additionally, they obligatorily relate two sentences, both the internal and the external argument must be explicitly present and take the form of complete sentences. This distinguishes them from other adverbial lexical elements that can also stand in sentence-initial position such as deictical sentential adverbs (gestern (yesterday), vorhin (recently), gern (gladly), and lieber (rather)), which do not demand two arguments to be explicitly present in the discourse (Pasch, Brauße, Waßner & Herrmann, 2003). All six connective ties are