My research focuses on the first and second language acquisition of connectives (Zufferey, 2010; Zufferey, Degand, Mak & Sanders, submitted) as well as their processing by adult speakers (Zufferey, 2014).
I perform cross-linguistic annotations of connectives in corpora used the PDTB taxonomy in order to compare connectives' usage across languages, especially English, French, German and Spanish (Zufferey & Cartoni, 2012; Zufferey & Degand, 2013). I am also interested in the explicit vs. implicit marking of discourse relations across languages.
WG3: I would like to perform experiments on language processing and acquisition that could help to test the cognitive soundness of categorical distinctions proposed in theoretical work and integrated in WG2.
- Zufferey S. (2010). Lexical Pragmatics and Theory of Mind: The Acquisition of Connectives. Amsterdam, John Benjamins, ix+192 p.
- Zufferey S. (2014). “Givenness, procedural meaning and connectives: The case of French puisque.” Journal of Pragmatics, 62, 121–135.
- Zufferey S. & Cartoni B. (2012). “English and French causal connectives in contrast.” Languages in Contrast, 12(2), 232-250.
- Zufferey S. & Degand L. (2013). “Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives in multilingual corpora.” Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.
- Zufferey S., Mak W., Degand L. & Sanders T. (submitted). “Advanced learners’ comprehension of discourse connectives: The role of L1 transfer across on-line and off-line tasks.” Second Language Research.
