Syntactic subordination affects discourse accessibility and subjective propositional importance: evidence from Russian

Discourse Processes. 2025. Vol. 62. No. 3. P. 155–176.

Bursov K., Slioussar N.

Various coordinating and subordinating conjunctions that connect clauses differ in their structural properties. Such properties seem to influence discourse prominence: references to antecedents from main clauses are more frequent than from subordinate. Structurally, coordinate and subordinate clauses, as well as in-between cases, can be distinguished based on the degree of integration to the host clause. We hypothesized that prominence effects previously found for main clauses are conditioned by the degree of integration: clauses integrated more deeply are less prominent in discourse, and vice versa. In four self-paced reading experiments in Russian, we varied coordination/subordination and the degree of integration within the same short discourses. We observed facilitated access to main clauses in subordination with a higher degree of integration. In addition, propositions from main clauses were judged as more important than those from subordinate clauses with a high but not low degree of integration. These results elucidate how properties of syntactic structures affect discourse representations.

Keywords: linguistics