The Structure and Processing of Explanatory Discourse in German and Norwegian: A Psycholinguistic Investigation into Discourse Theory

The ability to properly identify discourse relations such as Explanation, Continuation, Elaboration and Contrast is of utmost importance to make sense of the rhetorical structure of e.g. narration or argumentation. They connect larger parts of an utteranc e into a meaningful whole. Although discourse relations have been widely studied within a number of approaches, a comprehensive theoretical account of the nature of many of these relations is often lacking, both in terms of how they are determined and wit h regard to the question of which precise subparts of discourse they connect. The present cooperative group, consisting of psycholinguists, semanticists, and pragmaticists from the University of Tübingen and the Norwegian University of Science and Technol ogy (NTNU) in Trondheim, will focus on the discourse relation of Explanation. It will be studied from a German-Norwegian perspective, developing a more elaborate understanding of how causal discourse is structured and processed. The cooperation is intende d to develop into a joint application for funding from the European Science Foundation. More specifically, the group wants to contribute to our understanding of the processing of marked vs. non-marked explanation relations. We are guided by four main res earch questions: from a theoretical, semantic-pragmatic perspective, we are interested in (i) what linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge is needed to properly identify the parts of discourse which constitute an explanation and (ii) when explanation rela tions need to be marked and when not. From a psycholinguistic perspective, we seek answers to the following questions: (iii) which (kinds of) explanations are expected in upcoming discourse?, and (iv) are there any cross-linguistic differences with regard to the processing of explicitly and implicitly marked explanation relations in German and Norwegian?