C04 - Conceptual and referential activation in discourse
In this project, we study the prominence and accessibility of discourse entities in a discourse. Comparing referential chains (a blue car – it) and conceptual chains (a blue car – a red one), we test how the prominence of discourse entities is affected by subsequent linguistic material, with a specific focus on how syntactically subordinated vs coordinated clauses and discourse-structurally subordinated vs coordinated clauses affect the accessibility of referents and concepts.
Team
Prof. Dr. Klaus von Heusinger
Project Leader C04
Office: Philosophikum, room 2.116E-Mail: klaus.vonheusinger(at)uni-koeln.de
Phone: (+49) 221 470-4884
Dr. Derya Çokal
Post Doc C04
Office: SFB, Luxemburger Str. 299, room 1.03E-Mail: dcokal(at)uni-koeln.de
Phone: (+49) 221 470-89904
Student Assistants
Luca Beuckers | luca.beuckers(at)uni-koeln.de
Tamara Fuchs | tfuchs14(at)uni-koeln.de
Tiziana Ilie | tiziana.ilie(at)uni-koeln.de
Publications
To appear
- Buchholz, Timo & Klaus von Heusinger. To appear. German demonstratives and topic questions. In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Rotterdam.
2026
- Çokal, Derya, Abdulrahman Aloraini, Claudio Palominos-Flores, Cemal Demirlek, Burcu Verim, Berna Yalincetin, Emre Bora & Wolfram Hinzen. 2026. Three dimensions of speech coherence in people with early psychosis and their family members. Schizophrenia (Nature) 12. 2.
- Çokal, Derya, Martin Villalba, Rui He, Claudio Flores Palominos, Annkathrin Böke, Philipp Homan, Klaus Von Heusinger, Joseph Kambeitz & Wolfram Hinzen. 2026. What is the retest reliability of computationally extractable speech and language markers? Computer Speech & Language 100. 101981.
- Zimmerer, Vitor, Andromachi Tsoukala, Derya Çokal, Gabriel Sevilla, Maggie Douglas, Will Jones, I. Nicol Ferrier, et al. 2026. The relationship between language disorder and thought disorder: Comparing micro- and macrostructure of spoken narratives of people with aphasia and people with schizophrenia. Cortex 195. 81–95.
2025
- Çokal, Derya, Jason Bishop, Jacopo Torregrossa, Clare Patterson, Martine Grice, Simon Wehrle, Maria Lialiou, Sophie Repp, Heiko Seeliger, Sonja Eisenbeiss, Klaus von Heusinger, Kai Vogeley, Petra B Schumacher. 2025. Individual differences in discourse management. Frontiers in Communication 10.
2024
- Buchholz, Timo & Klaus von Heusinger. 2024. German demonstrative pronouns differ in their sensitivity to discourse and sentence topics. Frontiers in Communication 9. 1369290.
- Çokal, Derya & Klaus von Heusinger. 2024. German demonstrative pronouns in contrast. Dialogue & Discourse 15(1).
- von Heusinger, Klaus. 2024. Stichworte “Agensprominenz”, “Gegebenheitshierarchie”, “perspektivisches Zentrum”, “Prominenz”, “struktureller Attraktor.” In Helmut Glück & Michael Rödel (eds.), Metzler Lexikon Sprache 6. überarb. Auflage, 19; 211; 484; 514; 647. Heidelberg: Metzler.
- von Heusinger, Klaus, Tiago Duarte & Marco García García. 2024. Differential Object Marking and discourse prominence in Spanish. Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics 10(1). 1–37. pdf
- von Heusinger, Klaus, Frederike Weeber, Jet Hoek & Andreas Brocher. 2024. Informativity, information status and the accessibility of indefinite noun phrases. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 9(1). 1-20.
2023
- Bruera, Andrea, Yuan Tao, Andrew Anderson, Derya Çokal, Janosch Haber & Massimo Poesio. 2023. Modeling brain representations of words’ concreteness in context using GPT-2 and human ratings. Cognitive Science 47(12). e13388.
- Çokal, Derya, Ruth Filik, Patrick Sturt & Massimo Poesio. 2023. Anaphoric reference to mereological entities. Discourse Processes 60(3). 202–223.
- Çokal, Derya, Claudio Palominos-Flores, Berna Yalınçetin, Özlem Türe-Abacı, Emre Bora & Wolfram Hinzen. 2023. Referential noun phrases distribute differently in Turkish speakers with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Research.
- Poesio, Massimo, Juntao Yu, Silviu Paun, Abdulrahman Aloraini, Pengcheng Lu, Janosch Haber & Derya Çokal. 2023. Computational Models of Anaphora. Annual Review of Linguistics 9(1). 561–587.
- Weeber, Frederike. 2023. The German indefinite pronoun “ein(er)”. Interpretation and discourse linking. Universität zu Köln. Dissertation.
2022
- Çokal, Derya & Patrick Sturt. 2022. The real-time status of strong and weak islands. PLoS ONE 17(2). e0263879.
- Gianollo, Chiara, Klaus von Heusinger & Maria Napoli (eds.). 2022. Determiners and quantifiers: functions, variation, and change. Leiden: Brill.
- Gianollo, Chiara, Klaus von Heusinger & Maria Napoli. 2022. Reference and quantification in nominal phrases: the current landscape and the way ahead. In Chiara Gianollo, Klaus von Heusinger & Maria Napoli (eds.), Determiners and quantifiers: functions, variation, and change, 1–28. Leiden: Brill. pdf
- Primus, Beatrice, Franziska Kretzschmar, Klaus von Heusinger & Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. 2022. Relating agent prominence to discourse prominence: Do-clefts in German. Linguistics 60(6). 1811–1853.
- Voigt, Robert. 2022. Contrast and the pronominal use of the demonstratives der and dieser in German. In Annie Holtz, Iva Kovač & Rasmus Puggaard-Rode. Proceedings of ConSOLE XXX, 166–183. Leiden: Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.
- Voigt, Robert. 2022. Der Einfluss von Kontrast auf die Verwendung deutscher Personalpronomen und pronominaler Demonstrative. In Chiara Gianollo, Łukasz Jędrzejowski & Sofiana I. Lindemann (eds.), Paths through meaning and form. Festschrift offered to Klaus von Heusinger on the occasion of his 60th birthday, 264–269. Köln: Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Köln.
2021
- Çokal, Derya, Patrick Sturt & Fernanda Ferreira. 2021. Processing of discourse deixis by Turkish non-native speakers of English. Dialogue & Discourse 12(2). 38–80.
- von Heusinger, Klaus & Umut Özge. 2021. Inferable and partitive indefinites in topic position. In Anke Holler, Katja Suckow & Israel de la Fuente (eds.), Information structuring in discourse, 112–140. Leiden: Brill.
- Hoek, Jet, Merel Cleo Johanna Scholman & Ted J. M. Sanders. 2021. Is there less agreement when the discourse is underspecified? Annotation of coherence relations in TED talks. In Proceedings of the DiscAnn Workshop, 1–6.
- Konuk, Gökben & Klaus von Heusinger. 2021. Discourse prominence in Turkish: The interaction of grammatical function and semantic role. In Yulia Sinitsyna & Sergei Tatevosov (eds.), Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL 15), 109–120. Cambridge, MA: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics. preprint: pdf
- Riester, Arndt, Amalia Canes Nápoles & Jet Hoek. 2021. Combined discourse representations: Coherence relations and questions under discussion. In Proceedings of the DiscAnn Workshop, 1–5.
- Schroeder, Kristen, Stephanie Durrleman, Derya Çokal, Annabel Sanfeliu Delgado, Adela Masana Marin & Wolfram Hinzen. 2021. Relations between intensionality, theory of mind and complex syntax in autism spectrum conditions and typical development. Cognitive Development 59. 101071.
2020
- Brocher, Andreas, Frederike Weeber, Jet Hoek & Klaus von Heusinger. 2020. Referent management in discourse: The accessibility of weak definites. In S. Denison, M. Mack, Y. Xu & B.C. Armstrong (eds.), Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2829–2835. Toronto: Cognitive Science Society. pdf
- von Heusinger, Klaus & Roya Sadeghpoor. 2020. The specificity marker -e with indefinite noun phrases in Modern Colloquial Persian. In Kata Balogh, Anja Latrouite & Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. (eds.), Nominal anchoring: Specificity, definiteness and article systems across languages, 115–147. Berlin: Language Science Press. pdf
- Hinterwimmer, Stefan, Andreas Brocher & Umesh Patil. 2020. Demonstrative Pronouns as Anti-Logophoric Pronouns: An Experimental Investigation. Dialogue & Discourse 11(2). 110–127. preprint: pdf
2019
- von Heusinger, Klaus. 2019. Indefiniteness and specificity. In Barbara Abbott & Janet Gundel (eds.), Oxford Handbook of References, 146-167. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- von Heusinger, Klaus & Petra B. Schumacher. 2019. Discourse prominence: definition and application. Journal of Pragmatics 154. 117-127.
- Schumacher, Petra B. & Klaus von Heusinger (eds.). 2019. Special Issue: Prominence in Discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 154.
2018
- Brocher, Andreas & Klaus von Heusinger. 2018. A Dual-Process Activation Model: Processing definiteness and information status. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 3(1): 108. 1-34. pdf
- Hinterwimmer, Stefan & Andreas Brocher. 2018. An experimental investigation of the binding options of demonstrative pronouns in German. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 3(1): 77. 1-25. pdf
2017
- Brocher, Andreas & Tim Graf. 2017. Decision-related factors in pupil old/new effects: attention, response execution, and false memory. Neuropsychologia 102. 124-134.
- Brocher, Andreas & Tim Graf. 2017. Response: Commentary: Pupil old/new effects reflect stimulus encoding and decoding in short-term memory. Frontiers in Psychology 8:539.
- Weiland-Breckle, Hanna, Sam Featherstone & Klaus von Heusinger. 2017. Conditions on systematic polysemy: An empirical investigation on the pragmatics of predicate transfer. Linguistische Berichte 252. 459-491.