From the perspective of experimental pragmatics, how the interpretation of utterances, and thus, communication itself, is conditioned by connectives as procedural elements is the focus of these studies. Because of their high sensitivity to contextual factors and their different morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties, connectives trigger different relations between discourse segments. Since connectives constrain access to contexts to obtain the most relevant contextual effects, it can be theoretically assumed that they have an extraordinary communicative value.

These assumptions have been experimentally tested in a series of experiments carried out so far across different languages (Spanish, English, German, and Italian), with the aim of finding correlations between formal properties of connectives and their cognitive processing. The results of experimental research have already led to the formulation of a series of cognitive principles of discourse marking, which predict how connectives affect utterance processing (Loureda, Cruz & Recio 2021).

Current Researchers

• Prof. Dr. Óscar Loureda Lamas

• Dr. Inés Recio Fernández

• Sarah Thome, M.A.

Funded Projects

Proyecto REDES: Written Discourse and Cognition: Processing and comprehension of verbal and multimodal texts. Cooperation with the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. Funded by the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID) of Chile (2020-2022).

Discourse, cognition and linguistic markers: empirical studies on word processing using the eye-tracking method. Cooperation with the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile. Funded by the Chilean funding institution CONICYT (Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica, PII 20150058; 2016-2019).