Showing papers on "Antecedent (grammar) published in 2016"

Antecedents of Abusive Supervision: a Meta-analytic Review

Abstract: Recent studies of organizational behavior have witnessed a growing interest in unethical leadership, leading to the development of abusive supervision research. Given the increasing interest in the causes of abusive supervision, this study proposes an organizing framework for its antecedents and tests it using meta analysis. Based on an analysis of effect sizes drawn from 74 studies, comprising 30,063 participants, the relationship between abusive supervision and different antecedent categories are examined. The results generally support expected relationships across the four categories of abusive antecedents, including: supervisor related antecedents, organization related antecedents, subordinate related antecedents, and demographic characteristics of both supervisors and subordinates. In addition, possible moderators that can also influence the relationships between abusive supervision and its antecedents are also examined. The significance and implications of different level factors in explaining abusive supervision are discussed.

Culture, Conformity, and Emotional Suppression in Online Reviews

Abstract: This study examines the cultural background of consumers as an antecedent of online review characteristics. We theoretically propose and empirically examine the effect of cultural background, specifically individualism (versus collectivism), on the tendency of consumers to conform to prior opinion and the emotionality of the review text. We also examine how conformity and emotionality relate to review helpfulness. Our hypotheses are tested using a unique dataset that combines online restaurant reviews from TripAdvisor with measures of individualism – collectivism values. Our econometric analyses reveal that consumers from a collectivist culture are less likely to deviate from the average prior rating and to express emotion in their reviews. Moreover, those reviews that exhibit high conformity and intense emotions are perceived to be less helpful. We also present several important implications for the management of online review platforms in light of these findings, which reflect the previously unidentified drivers of systematic differences in the characteristics of online reviews.

Trust in health information websites: A systematic literature review on the antecedents of trust:

Abstract: Health websites are important sources of information for consumers. In choosing websites, trust in websites largely determines which website to access and how to best utilize the information. Thus, it is critical to understand why consumers trust certain websites and distrust others. A systematic literature review was conducted with the goal of identifying the antecedents of trust in health information websites. After four rounds of screening process, 20 articles between 2000 and 2013 were harvested. Factors that determine trust are classified into individual difference antecedents, website-related antecedents, and consumer-to-website interaction-related antecedents. The most frequently studied antecedents were socio-demographics, information quality, appearance, and perceived reputation of the website. Each antecedent of trust are discussed in detail and future research directions are proposed.

Retrieval Interference in Syntactic Processing: The Case of Reflexive Binding in English.

Abstract: It has been proposed that in online sentence comprehension the dependency between a reflexive pronoun such as himself/herself and its antecedent is resolved using exclusively syntactic constraints. Under this strictly syntactic search account, Principle A of the binding theory— which requires that the antecedent c-command the reflexive within the same clause that the reflexive occurs in—constrains the parser’s search for an antecedent. The parser thus ignores candidate antecedents that might match agreement features of the reflexive (e.g., gender) but are ineligible as potential antecedents because they are in structurally illicit positions. An alternative possibility accords no special status to structural constraints: in addition to using Principle A, the parser also uses non-structural cues such as gender to access the antecedent. According to cue-based retrieval theories of memory (e.g., Lewis and Vasishth, 2005), the use of non-structural cues should result in increased retrieval times and occasional errors when candidates partially match the cues, even if the candidates are in structurally illicit positions. In this paper, we first show how the retrieval processes that underlie the reflexive binding are naturally realized in the Lewis and Vasishth (2005) model. We present the predictions of the model under the assumption that both structural and non-structural cues are used during retrieval, and provide a critical analysis of previous empirical studies that failed to find evidence for the use of non-structural cues, suggesting that these failures may be Type II errors. We use this analysis and the results of further modeling to motivate a new empirical design that we use in an eye tracking study. The results of this study confirm the key predictions of the model concerning the use of non-structural cues, and are inconsistent with the strictly syntactic search account. These results present a challenge for theories advocating the infallibility of the human parser in the case of reflexive resolution, and provide support for the inclusion of agreement features such as gender in the set of retrieval cues.

Online processing of subject pronouns in monolingual and heritage bilingual speakers of Mexican Spanish

Abstract: In this self-paced reading study, we first tested the cross-linguistic validity of the position of antecedent strategy proposed for anaphora resolution in Italian (Carminati, 2002) in a Latin American variety of Spanish. We then examined the application of this strategy by Spanish heritage speakers of the same dialect who were largely English dominant. Forty-five monolingual speakers of Mexican Spanish and 28 Spanish heritage speakers of Mexican descent read sentences in which null and overt subject pronouns were biased for and against expected antecedent biases. Our results suggest that Mexican monolinguals display distinct antecedent biases for null and overt pronouns. Furthermore, the Spanish heritage speakers, though not monolingual-like, did not violate discourse constraints on the resolution of overt pronouns, contra the findings of offline research (see Keating, VanPatten & Jegerski, 2011). We discuss the findings in terms of a processing-based account.

Antecedents and Consequences of Envy

Abstract: The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between individual attributes and envy, and to determine how envy may impact personal response variables in the workplace. To address these issues we apply Vecchio’s theory on antecedents and consequences of envy (1995) as a theoretical framework. The present study relied on a cross-sectional measurement design. A total of 135 leaders and 772 followers employed in business organizations participated. SEM analysis shows that span of supervision serves as an important antecedent of envy, where span of supervision is significantly associated to envy via supportive leadership. Furthermore, envy seems to be indirectly and negatively related to self-esteem via distress and directly related to social loafing. The implications of these findings are discussed, and suggestions for future research are outlined.

Social persuasion to develop rapport in high-stakes interviews: qualitative analyses of Asian-Pacific practices

Abstract: Motivating cooperation in official police interviews is a central professional challenge across jurisdictions and cultures. Rapport-building is regarded as a critical antecedent of interviewee cooperation, but relatively little is known about how rapport is developed in practice. A total of 123 experienced intelligence and investigative interviewers from five Asian-Pacific jurisdictions (Australia, Indonesia, Philippines, South Korea and Sri Lanka) participated in in-depth interviews (mean 68 min) about rapport-building techniques used with high-value interviewees. The majority of participants had more than 10 years' experience and 63% had conducted between 100 and 500 interviews. Responses were recorded, transcribed and de-identified for systematic deductive analysis according to the principles of persuasion outlined by Cialdini, to assess the nature and extent of forms of social influence strategies applied. Reported rapport-development techniques were classifiable as one or more of these six principles...

Singular they: an empirical study of generic pronoun use

Abstract: The present study addresses an issue of the English language that has been discussed at length for the past several decades: Which pronoun should one use when referring to a singular, genderless antecedent (e.g., student)? Though much has been written on the subject of the use of the generic masculine, singular they, and he or she constructions in published works, and other studies have looked at how English speakers process and interpret the aforementioned pronouns in writing, few studies have researched the use of these pronouns in free response to questions including a singular, genderless referent. The present study contributes to the last of these three methodologies by exploring which pronouns native English speakers use when writing about a genderless person (i.e., "the ideal student"). The results of this study indicate that a large majority of participants (79%) include a gender-inclusive approach (he or she type constructions or singular they) when referring to a singular, genderless antecedent; 68% use singular they. However, participants note that he or she type variations do not include some who may not identify within the gender binary.

Pragmatic principles in anaphora resolution at the syntax-discourse interface

Abstract: Previous experimental research has shown that the syntax-discourse interface can be a locus of deficits for learners, even at very advanced levels. In this paper an L2 Spanish corpus is used to investigate Anaphora Resolution (AR) at the syntax-discourse interface (i.e., how null/overt pronouns and NP subjects refer to their antecedents in discourse). A fine-grained tagset was designed to annotate formal, pragmatic and information-status AR factors in a sample of very advanced L1 English – L2 Spanish learners vs. a Spanish native control subcorpus from the CEDEL2 corpus. The corpus analysis results reveal that, though very advanced learners can attain similar patterns to Spanish natives with AR, they show certain deficits: they are pragmatically more redundant than ambiguous. This is explained in terms of a new proposal: the Pragmatic Principles Violation Hypothesis. Results also show that the syntax of topic shift is more complex than previously assumed, with higher rates of NPs than overt pronouns. This can be accounted for by the nature of the antecedent (number of potential antecedents and their gender differences).

Linguistic and Cognitive Evidence About Anaphora

Abstract: Linguistics and psychology provide us with a theoretical analysis of what anaphoric expressions mean, and evidence about how their interpretation is recovered in context—in particular, which information is used. In this chapter we discuss this evidence. Respective key concepts will be defined, including the main types of relations between anaphor and antecedent and the formal notion of discourse model. Moreover, the most important factors (constraints and preferences) will be identified that are deemed relevant for interpreting anaphoric expressions, and it will be looked at evidence from corpora and psycholinguistics in favor of these factors. This includes a description of the main models of local focus, distinguishing between discrete and activation-based approaches.

Mindfulness: Nurturing Global Mind-set and Leadership

Abstract: In this article, we attempt to explore global leadership and global mind-set from the perspective of mindfulness. Through a synthesis of the literature on mindfulness and scholarship on global mind-set and global leadership, this article explicates the importance of mindfulness in developing a global mind-set and, thereby, acquiring global leadership competencies. Taking a task-analytic approach to global leadership, we attempt to elaborate on how mindfulness can act as an important antecedent for global mind-set and hence for global leadership. Implications for future research and managerial practice are highlighted. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Referential Choice: Predictability and Its Limits.

Abstract: We report a study of referential choice in discourse production, understood as the choice between various types of referential devices, such as pronouns and full noun phrases. Our goal is to predict referential choice, and to explore to what extent such prediction is possible. Our approach to referential choice includes a cognitively informed theoretical component, corpus analysis, machine learning methods and experimentation with human participants. Machine learning algorithms make use of 25 factors, including referent’s properties (such as animacy and protagonism), the distance between a referential expression and its antecedent, the antecedent’s syntactic role, and so on. Having found the predictions of our algorithm to coincide with the original almost 90% of the time, we hypothesized that fully accurate prediction is not possible because, in many situations, more than one referential option is available. This hypothesis was supported by an experimental study, in which participants answered questions about either the original text in the corpus, or about a text modified in accordance with the algorithm’s prediction. Proportions of correct answers to these questions, as well as participants’ rating of the questions’ difficulty, suggested that divergences between the algorithm’s prediction and the original referential device in the corpus occur overwhelmingly in situations where the referential choice is not categorical.

A Deep Neural Network for Chinese Zero Pronoun Resolution

Abstract: Existing approaches for Chinese zero pronoun resolution overlook semantic information. This is because zero pronouns have no descriptive information, which results in difficulty in explicitly capturing their semantic similarities with antecedents. Moreover, when dealing with candidate antecedents, traditional systems simply take advantage of the local information of a single candidate antecedent while failing to consider the underlying information provided by the other candidates from a global perspective. To address these weaknesses, we propose a novel zero pronoun-specific neural network, which is capable of representing zero pronouns by utilizing the contextual information at the semantic level. In addition, when dealing with candidate antecedents, a two-level candidate encoder is employed to explicitly capture both the local and global information of candidate antecedents. We conduct experiments on the Chinese portion of the OntoNotes 5.0 corpus. Experimental results show that our approach substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art method in various experimental settings.

The More Antecedents, the Merrier: Resolving Multi-Antecedent Anaphors

Abstract: Anaphor resolution is an important task in NLP with many applications. Despite much research effort, it remains an open problem. The difficulty of the problem varies substantially across different sub-problems. One sub-problem, in particular, has been largely untouched by prior work despite occurring frequently throughout corpora: the anaphor that has multiple antecedents, which here we call multi-antecedent anaphors or manaphors. Current coreference resolvers restrict anaphors to at most a single antecedent. As we show in this paper, relaxing this constraint poses serious problems in coreference chain-building, where each chain is intended to refer to a single entity. This work provides a formalization of the new task with preliminary insights into multi-antecedent noun-phrase anaphors, and offers a method for resolving such cases that outperforms a number of baseline methods by a significant margin. Our system uses local agglomerative clustering on candidate antecedents and an existing coreference system to score clusters to determine which cluster of mentions is antecedent for a given anaphor. When we augment an existing coreference system with our proposed method, we observe a substantial increase in performance (0.6 absolute CoNLL F1) on an annotated

Embedding the Antecedent in Gapping: Low Coordination and the Role of Parallelism

Abstract: tics 22:299–356. Schlenker, Philippe. To appear. Super monsters–Part I. Semantics and Pragmatics. Schlenker, Philippe, Jonathan Lamberton, and Mirko Santoro. 2013. Iconic variables. Linguistics and Philosophy 36:91–149. Schwarzschild, Roger. 1999. GIVENness, AvoidF and other constraints on the placement of accent. Natural Language Semantics 7:141–177. Vallduvı́, Enric. 1992. The informational component. New York: Garland. Wilbur, Ronnie B. 1999. Stress in ASL: Empirical evidence and linguistic issues. Language and Speech 42:229–250. Wilbur, Ronnie B. 2012. Information structure. In Sign language: An international handbook, ed. by Roland Pfau, Markus Steinbach, and Bencie Woll, 462–489. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Wilbur, Ronnie B., and Aleix M. Martı́nez. 2002. Physical correlates of prosodic structure in American Sign Language. In Papers from the 38th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, ed. by Mary Andronis, Erin Debenport, Anne Pycha, and Keiko Yoshimura, 693–704. Chicago: University of Chicago, Chicago Linguistic Society. Wilbur, Ronnie B., and Cynthia Patschke. 1998. Body leans and marking contrast in ASL. Journal of Pragmatics 30:275–303.

When discourse met null subjects

Abstract: In this paper a novel view of the distribution of null subjects in Spanish is explored in which the discourse category which the antecedent of pro is analysed. Implementing Frascarelli’s (2007) work, I propose that the crucial condition to meet is for the null subject to be coreferential with an Aboutness-Shift Topic, which must be either an explicit or null copy in the local domain where pro is inserted. When null, this antecedent can refer back to any type of discourse category. The analysis is supported by an experiment run among native speakers of Spanish.

From holism to compositionality: memes and the evolution of segmentation, syntax, and signification in music and language

Abstract: Steven Mithen argues that language evolved from an antecedent he terms “Hmmmmm, [meaning it was] Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic”. Owing to certain innate and learned factors, a capacity for segmentation and cross-stream mapping in early Homo sapiens broke the continuous line of Hmmmmm, creating discrete replicated units which, with the initial support of Hmmmmm, eventually became the semantically freighted words of modern language. That which remained after what was a bifurcation of Hmmmmm arguably survived as music, existing as a sound stream segmented into discrete units, although one without the explicit and relatively fixed semantic content of language. All three types of utterance – the parent Hmmmmm, language, and music – are amenable to a memetic interpretation which applies Universal Darwinism to what are understood as language and musical memes. On the basis of Peter Carruthers’ distinction between ‘cognitivism’ and ‘communicativism’ in language, and William Calvin’s theories of cortical information encoding, a framework is hypothesized for the semantic and syntactic associations between, on the one hand, the sonic patterns of language memes (‘lexemes’) and of musical memes (‘musemes’) and, on the other hand, ‘mentalese’ conceptual structures, in Chomsky’s ‘Logical Form’ (LF).

The Sticky Reading: VP Ellipsis Without Parallel Binding

Abstract: VP Ellipsis (VPE) whose antecedent VP contains a pronoun famously gives rise to an ambiguity between strict and sloppy readings. Since Sag 's ( 1976 ) seminal work, it is generally assumed that the strict reading involves free pronouns in both the elided VP and its antecedent, whereas the sloppy reading involves bound pronouns. The majority of current approaches to VPE are tailored to derive this parallel binding requirement, ruling out mixed readings where one of the VPs involves a bound pronoun and the other a free pronoun in parallel positions. Contrary to this assumption, it is observed that there are cases of VPE where the antecedent VP contains a bound pronoun but the elided VP contains a free E-type pronoun anchored to the quantifier, in violation of parallel binding. We dub this the 'sticky reading' of VPE. To account for it, we propose a new identity condition on VPE which is less stringent than is standardly assumed. We formalize this using an extension of Roberts 's ( 2012 ) Question under Discussion (QuD) theory of information structure.

Cross-linguistic influence at the discourse–syntax interface: Insights from anaphora resolution in child second language learners of Italian

Abstract: This paper reports the results of an experimental study on the resolution of intra-sentential anaphora in Italian by two groups of 13–14-year-olds: monolingual native Italian speakers and highly proficient child second language (L2) learners of Italian whose native language is Croatian. In a picture selection task the participants were asked to identify antecedents of null and overt subject pronouns in ambiguous forward and backward anaphora sentences. Our assumption in the paper was that Italian and Croatian do not differ with respect to the antecedent biases of null and overt subject pronouns in the contexts under investigation. As predicted, the L2 learners expressed pragmatically appropriate antecedent preferences in all conditions. They even selected the pragmatically inappropriate subject antecedent for the overt pronoun less often than the native speakers, especially in backward anaphora. The L2 learners’ antecedent preferences closely mirror those established in previous research for their age-mat...

Filling the Silence: Reactivation, not Reconstruction

Abstract: In a self-paced reading experiment, we investigated the processing of sluicing constructions (`sluices') whose antecedent contained a known garden-path structure in German. Results showed decreased processing times for sluices with garden-path antecedents as well as a disadvantage for antecedents with non-canonical word order downstream from the ellipsis site. A post-hoc analysis showed the garden-path advantage also to be present in the region right before the ellipsis site. While no existing account of ellipsis processing explicitly predicted the results, we argue that they are best captured by combining a local antecedent mismatch effect with memory trace reactivation through reanalysis.

The Finnish possessive suffix

Abstract: The Finnish possessive suffix constitutes a perennial problem of Finnish syntax, debated, without resolution, for decades. The phenomenon has been approached from (at least) three different viewpoints. According to the first one, the possessive suffix constitutes a non-finite agreement marker, being regulated by phi-agreement (Agree in the current minimalist theory). The second hypothesis regards it as an anaphoric element, subject to binding theory and the binding conditions. The third analysis regards the possessive suffix as a mixed category, sometimes falling under agreement, other times under binding. All these analyses share a common ground in the claim that the possessive suffix must be ccommanded by its “antecedent”, whether by agreement or by binding. In this article, we report anomalous data, which does not fall under any of these views: the possessive suffix need not, in fact, be c-commanded by its antecedent. We provide a descriptive account of these facts by stating that, under certain circumstances, a failed search for a c-commanding antecedent triggers a discourse search as a last resort. We then propose that these facts are indicative of the presence of a null pronominal, a non-finite pro, in close proximity of the possessive suffix. In addition, the possessive suffix is an agreement marker for the pro-element.

On QUD-based licensing of strict and sloppy ambiguities

Abstract: According to standard theories of VP-ellipsis, possible readings are determined by constraints (syntactic, semantic, discoursal) that apply jointly to the antecedent and ellipsis clauses. Drawing on insights from a number of previous authors, I present two arguments for a model in which VP-ellipsis meanings are crucially dependent on the operative (and often implicitly resolved) question-under-discussion (QUD; Roberts 1998/2012), specifically requiring that the meaning of an ellipsis clause be a member of the QUD's alternative set.

Proving Parameterized Systems Safe by Generalizing Clausal Proofs of Small Instances

Abstract: We describe an approach to proving safety properties of parameterized reactive systems. Clausal inductive proofs for small instances are generalized to quantified formulae, which are then checked against the whole family of systems. Clausal proofs are generated at the bit-level by the IC3 algorithm. The clauses are partitioned into blocks, each of which is represented by a quantified implication formula, whose antecedent is a conjunction of modular linear arithmetic constraints.

Breaking de Morgan's law in counterfactual antecedents

Abstract: The main goal of this paper is to investigate the relation between the meaning of a sentence and its truth conditions. We report on a comprehension experiment on counterfactual conditionals, based on a context in which a light is controlled by two switches. Our main finding is that the truth-conditionally equivalent clauses (i) switch A or switch B is down and (ii) switch A and switch B are not both up make different semantic contributions when embedded in a conditional antecedent. Assuming compositionality, this means that (i) and (ii) differ in meaning, which implies that the meaning of a sentential clause cannot be identified with its truth conditions. We show that our data have a clear explanation in inquisitive semantics: in a conditional antecedent, (i) introduces two distinct assumptions, while (ii) introduces only one. Independently of the complications stemming from disjunctive antecedents, our results also challenge analyses of counterfactuals in terms of minimal change from the actual state of affairs: we show that such analyses cannot account for our findings, regardless of what changes are considered minimal.

On establishing coreference in Left Dislocation constructions

Abstract: The phenomenon of left dislocation (LD) has received relatively little attention in the generative literature. In Government & Binding theory and early versions of Minimalist Syntax, the left-dislocated expression is conventionally taken to be base-generated in its sentence-initial surface position and the resumptive pronoun in some other position in the structure. The establishment of an (obligatory) coreferential relationship between these expressions is usually ascribed to a special binding mechanism, A-bar binding, though this issue is seldom explicitly addressed in LD studies. The aim of this paper is to present, in broad outline, an alternative analysis of LD constructions, one that incorporates the core hypotheses of the nominal shell analysis of coreferential constructions put forward by Oosthuizen (2013a,b). On this analysis, the resumptive pronoun and the referring expression that is to serve as its antecedent are base-generated in a nominal shell structure which is headed by a presentational focus light noun, a functional category belonging to a natural class of identificational elements. The coreferential relationship between the two expressions is established within this structure by means of phi-feature valuation. The antecedent is subsequently raised into the left-periphery of the sentence, where it surfaces as the left-dislocated expression. It is claimed that such an analysis can account for the phenomenon of obligatory coreferentiality in LD constructions in terms of formal devices that are either already provided by or compatible with the basic assumptions and concepts of Minimalist Syntax. A tentative proposal is also put forward to account for the word order in LD constructions, specifically for the fact that left-dislocation does not bring about (surface) subject-verb inversion in V2 languages such as Afrikaans.

Aspects of anaphora in Chinese and in some Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages, the ‘syntactic’ versus ‘pragmatic’ language typology, and neo-Gricean pragmatics

Abstract: Anaphora refers to a relation between two or more linguistic elements, in which the interpretation of one element (called an anaphoric expression) is in some way determined by the interpretation of another element (called an antecedent). Two types of anaphora – (i) null subjects and (ii) long-distance reflexivisation – will be briefly compared and contrasted between Chinese and some Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages, showing how they are different typologically. Following Huang, Y, Anaphora: A cross-linguistic study. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000a, Huang, Y, Bayesian probabilistic model of discourse anaphoric comprehension, linguistic typology, and neo-Gricean pragmatics. Theoretical Linguistics, 39, 95–108, 2013a), utilising intra-sentential anaphora as a testing ground, I shall re-hypothesise that languages in the world can roughly be divided into two groups: syntactic (such as English, French, and German) and pragmatic (such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). Finally, I shall outline an analysis of long-distance reflexivisation in Chinese in terms of my neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of anaphora.

Towards multiple antecedent coreference resolution in specialized discourse

Abstract: Comunicacio presentada a: LREC 2016, Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, celebrada del 23 al 28 de maig de 2016 a Portorož, Eslovenia.

Conditional antecedents containing the German discourse particle denn: a corpus study

Abstract: We discuss the semantic contribution and distribution of conditional antecedents containing the discourse particle denn (“antecedents with denn”, abbreviated as AWD). We propose that AWDs occur only in contexts where (i) the speaker does not believe the antecedent proposition p to hold, and (ii) the truth of p has been nonexplicitly (= tacitly) proposed. To gain a better understanding of (ii), we conduct two corpus studies. The first study investigates the relative location of AWDs with respect to their consequents. We find that unlike antecedents of regular hypothetical conditionals, AWDs occur significantly more often after the material in the consequent and parenthetically inside this material than before it. In a second study, we investigate the position of the tacit proposal relative to the AWD. We find that it typically precedes the AWD. Both results are in accordance with (ii). We then present a classification of the types of tacit proposals that we find with AWDs: speakers use AWDs to qualify their own statements or to doubt proposals of others, in both cases managing potential updates to the common ground.

Why Forwarded Email Threads are Hard to Read: The Email Format as an Antecedent of Email Overload

Abstract: Research has shown that excessive email use leads to feelings of being overwhelmed and stressed. Existing coping solutions, which mitigate email overload, address the number of emails and, in consequence, the time spent on emails. These approaches are congruent with existing research on antecedents of email overload. Further coping solutions include addressing email threads. However, we lack a theoretical grounding for perceiving email threads as an antecedent of email overload. I suggest cognitive load theory as a means of investigating the format of forwarded email threads in an experiment. I found support for the effects on reading time and performance in terms of correct answers per second, findings that confirm that forwarded email threads are an antecedent of email overload and that we need a new conceptualization of email overload.