Sentence Topics,Syntactic Subjects,and Domains in Texts

Abstract

In sentences with validity markers in the syntactic subject and adjacent positions, the frequent correspondence between syntactic subject and sentence topic in English sentences is broken. Because this correspondence has been shown to have substantial and positive effects upon readers' processing of and perceptions about texts, breaking the correspondence might have significant negative effects on readers. This study begins to explore how such syntactic subjects affect readers. It shows that readers recall such subjects very poorly, but it also suggests that in order to discover more precisely how readers represent such subjects in memory, new and rich models of language and of possible domains in texts will be needed.

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