Tony’s research centered on issues in the area that we would now call experimental pragmatics, but he was doing the research at the earliest stages of the development of the field. He focused on the need for language researchers to take account of context and to examine meaning that extended beyond the sentence, the role played by attention in language comprehension, and the importance of putting language in its literary and creative context. He published many papers on these topics but the range of his work is demonstrated in his five books. Understanding Written Language: Comprehension beyond the sentence (with Simon Garrod) was published in 1981and is still being cited 35 years later. This was followed by the highly influential The Mind of Man: Models of Human Understanding in 1987. Then with Linda Moxey he published Communicating Quantities: A psychological perspective in 1993 followed by the edited volume The Nature and Limits of Human Understanding in 2003. His final book with Catherine Emmott Mind, Brain and Narrative appeared in 2012.
The papers in this special issue reflect the range of Tony’s interests. The first set are about discourse coherence and aspects of meaning beyond the sentence. Clifton and Frazier’s paper “Context effects in discourse: the QUD” considers the notion Question Under Discussion (as developed in theories of dialogue semantics) in relation to processes of discourse comprehension. Bohan and Filik in their paper “Perspective effects during reading: Evidence from text change-detection” use the change detection paradigm (developed by Tony) to investigate the role of perspective in discourse comprehension. The paper by King, Loy and Corley on “Contextual effects on online pragmatic inferences of deception” investigates how speaker fluency feeds into our judgments of the veracity of utterances.
The second set of papers are on processing referential expressions and expressions of quantity, something in which Tony was especially interested. Moxey’s paper “Processing quantified noun phrases with numbers versus verbal quantifiers” develops earlier work with Tony on the effects of choosing numerical compared to other forms of quantity expression (e.g., many or probably) to convey information about risk. Ingram and Ferguson use ERP data to infer under what circumstances readers immediately access complement set information (i.e., the complement of the set referred to). In their paper “Complement set reference after implicitly small quantities: An event-related potentials study” they show that this occurs when a discourse character’s preference for a large quantity is denied in the text. The paper by Çokal and Sturt “The Effect of Referring Expression on Antecedent-Grouping Choice in Plural Reference Resolution” concerns antecedent grouping an issue that Tony published several papers on. Their paper shows how choice of the alternative referring expressions these or they highlight different groupings of antecedent referents.
Tony was particularly interested in how counterfactual information was represented in discourse comprehension and the third set of papers address this and related questions about the processing of the alternative meaning of indirect requests. Ferguson and Jayes’s paper “Plausibility but not perspective influences the processing of counterfactual narratives” demonstrates that readers detect anomalies in implausible contexts even when those contexts are counterfactual suggesting that readers do not suspend normal processing on the basis of inferences about reality. Stewart et al.’s paper “Comprehension of indirect requests is influenced by their degree of imposition” shows how the degree to which an indirect request imposes on the listener affects its immediate non-literal interpretation as an indirect request.
The final set of papers are about the role played by attention (i.e., ‘focus’ in Tony’s terminology) in language processing. Garnham, Oakhill and Reynolds’s paper “Anaphoric Islands and Anaphoric Forms: The Role of Explicit and Implicit Focus” shows how introducing referents directly (e.g., lies) or indirectly through a cognate verb (e.g., lying) affects their discourse accessibility which they explain in terms of Sanford and Garrod’s (1981) notions of explicit and implicit focus. The paper “Reading in Healthy Ageing: The Selective Use of Information Structuring Cues” by Price and Sanford shows how cues to accessibility of antecedents operate differently across the lifespan: older readers are sensitive to primacy of mention whereas younger readers are especially sensitive to linguistic cues to information structure (e.g., introducing referents with proper names and in subordinate clauses). The final two papers in the issue are concerned with attention effects on language production rather than comprehension. In their paper “Attention and memory play different roles in syntactic choice during sentence production” Myachykov, Garrod and Scheepers argue that memory accessibility and focus of attention play different roles in sentence planning with the former affecting syntactic choice (e.g., choosing passive over active frames) and the latter facilitating syntactic assembly. And finally in their paper “Coordinating utterances during turn-taking: The role of prediction, response preparation, and articulation” Corps, Gambi and Pickering discuss selective attention in conversation and show how comprehension can interfere with preparing and articulating the response.
Such a special issue takes much organization and preparation and I need to especially thank two members of the Society for Text and Discourse Edward O’Brien and Anne Cook for their major editorial contributions. They both helped instigate the special issue and then both contributed extensively to the editorial process.