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
Principal Investigator B04 and C04
Office: Philosophikum, room 2.116 E-mail: klaus.vonheusinger(at)uni-koeln.de Phone: (+49) 221 470-4884 Web: Prof. Dr. Klaus von Heusinger

Timo Buchholz
Postdoc C04
Office: SFB, Luxemburger Str. 299, room 1.05 E-mail:timo.buchholz(at)uni-koeln.de Phone: (+49) 221 470-89902

Dr. Derya Cokal
Postdoc C04
Office: SFB, Luxemburger Str. 299, room 1.05 E-Mail: dcokal(at)uni-koeln.de Phone: (+49) 221 470-89902 Web: Dr. Derya Cokal

Frederike Weeber
Doctoral student C04
Office: SFB, Luxemburger Str. 299, room 1.05 E-mail: fweeber1(at)uni-koeln.de Phone: (+49) 221 470-89902 Web: Frederike Weeber

Gökben Nagihan Konuk
Associate C04
Office: Luxemburger Str. 299, room 3.03 E-Mail: goekben.konuk(at)uni-koeln.de Phone: (+49) 221 470-89920
Publications
To appear
- Hoek, Jet, Merel C. J. Scholman & Ted J. M. Sanders. To appear. Is there less agreement when the discourse is underspecified? Annotation of coherence relations in TED talks. Proceedings of the DiscAnn Workshop.
- Primus, Beatrice, Franziska Kretzschmar, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann & Klaus von Heusinger. To appear. Relating agent prominence to discourse prominece: Do-clefts in German. Linguistics.
- Riester, Arndt, Amalia Canes Nápoles & Jet Hoek. To appear. Combined discourse representations: Coherence relations and questions under discussion. Proceedings of the DiscAnn Workshop.
2022
- 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
2021
- 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
- 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.
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.