Acceso usuarios
Venezia, Italia
Palma de Mallorca, España
The counter-argumentative Italian connective tuttavia (Eng. “however”) marks the disruption of a causal chain by introducing an unexpected conclusion that cancels inferences drawn from a previous premise. Thus, under neutral conditions, tuttavia connects two argumentatively anti-oriented members of discourse. Conversely, if those members hold a coordinated relationship, the premise would be argumentatively insufficient to allow a discursive relationship of counter-argumentation, resulting in discursive incoherence. An eye-tracking reading experiment compared the processing costs generated by an utterance in which tuttavia was inserted in a neutral argumentative structure with those of a causal relationship between two co-oriented discourse members. Results showed that, faced with this type of argumentative insufficiency, readers seem to desist from processing as the cognitive effort of an incompatible assumption may be excessive.
