It has been observed that the accessibility of parts of a multi-sentence/clausal discourse, as tested via anaphoric devices, is affected by the semantic relations that the respective discourse units stand in, the so-called Right Frontier Constraint (RFC). In a case study that picks up findings by Syrett & Koev (2015) on the special status of sentence-final appositive relative clauses, I provided experimental evidence for the RFC, as well as the need for a theory of discourse structure to take syntactic-pragmatic information of the linked clauses into account. Since then, I have been exploring the question of what’s underlying the RFC with an attempt to connect QUD-based theories of discourse structure with relational approaches such as SDRT.
Output:
– Exploring a Connection between QUDs and Discourse Structure. Talk at Workshop on “At-Issue, Scope and Coherence” @Cologne, July 2018. [handout]
– Final Appositives at the Right Frontier: An Experimental Investigation of Anaphoric Potential. Talk at Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB23) @Barcelona, September 2018.
– Pronouns at the right frontier: discourse structure affects accessibility of final appositives. Talk at 2nd International Conference on Prominence in Language (ICPL2) @Cologne, July 2018.
– Pronouns at the right frontier: discourse structure affects accessibility of final appositives. Poster at the 31st Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference (CUNY31) @UC Davis, March 2018. [poster]
alex göbel 