SPP 1727:  XPrag.de: New Pragmatic Theories Based on Experimental Evidence

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Medicine ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: from 2014 to 2024
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 237157834

This Priority Programme is a national research network, where linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers together pursue the overall goal to develop a precise pragmatic theory that is grounded in the understanding of language processing. By formulating pragmatic models based on cognitive mechanisms and their evaluation with experimental methods, the advancement of pragmatic theory should be enhanced. In the current first phase, 16 projects are funded.
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics that deals with speaker meaning, i.e., with what is meant (and not primarily with what is literally said). This meaning may depend among others on the context or the situation. An example are so-called implicatures: The sentence "Peter has three children" would, in principle, also be true in a situation in which Peter has four children. But since the listener assumes that the speaker is as informative as possible, she concludes, i.e., she draws the implicature, that Peter has no more than three children.
Another example are meaning shifts like in expressions of the type "The steak at Table 7 asks for the bill" where "steak" is not used in its literal meaning (food), but refers to a customer who has ordered a steak. So the listener interprets what is said (steak) depending on the specific situation in which there is a customer who ordered a steak.
Phenomena of this kind (and others such as vague expressions, projective meaning, metaphors and coercion, but also speaker intentions, presuppositions and anaphoric references) are investigated experimentally and modelled theoretically in the projects involved in this Priority Programme. Different types of populations are tested - children, adults, speakers with language disorders and second language learners. In addition, different languages - e.g., German, English, Hungarian and Sign language - are investigated.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• International Connection: Austria, China, United Kingdom, USA

Projects

• Affirmative and rejective responses to negative assertions and questions (Applicant Repp, Sophie )
• Agentivity, Animacy and Telicity: Pragmatic Inferences in Intransitive Clauses (Applicant Philipp, Markus )
• Bias in Polar Questions (Applicants Braun, Bettina ;  Romero, Ph.D., Maribel )
• Brain Signatures of Communication (BraiSiCo) (Applicant Pulvermüller, Friedemann )
• Composition in context: Contextual effects on the online processing of eventive coercion (Applicant Bott, Oliver )
• Coordination Funds (Applicants Sauerland, Uli ;  Schumacher, Petra )
• Discourse Referents in Space - Anaphora Resolution in German Sign Language (Applicant Steinbach, Markus )
• Exhaustiveness in embedded questions across languages (Applicants Onea Gáspár, Victor Edgar ;  Zimmermann, Malte )
• Exhaustiveness in It-Clefts (Applicants Onea Gáspár, Victor Edgar ;  Zimmermann, Malte )
• Experimental game theory and scalar implicatures: investigating variation in context and scale type (Applicant Benz, Anton )
• Focus and thematic role assignment: A comparison of Hungarian and German in Child Language Comprehension (Applicants Knoeferle, Pia ;  Skopeteas, Stavros )
• Ich sehe was was du nicht siehst: Common ground and contrastive information in childrens and adults reference resolution (Applicants Höhle, Barbara ;  Wartenburger, Isabell )
• Lexical Inference vs Scalar Implicature (Applicant Sauerland, Uli )
• Modelling the Use of Quantifiers in Typical and Atypical Speakers Probabilistically (Applicants Franke, Michael ;  Krifka, Manfred ;  Sauerland, Uli )
• Obligatory Presupposition Triggers – Experimental Evidence (Applicant Beck, Sigrid )
• One- versus two-step models of language comprehension: Investigations employing negative sentences (Applicants Dudschig, Carolin ;  Kaup, Barbara ;  Leuthold, Hartmut )
• Probabilistic Modelling of pragmatic processing and utterance production (Applicant Franke, Michael )
• Processing speaker's meaning: Epistemic state, cooperation, commitment (Applicant Schumacher, Petra )
• Reconsidering the epistemic step: The role of speaker and listener perspectives for the processing of quantity and temporal implicatures (Applicant Spychalska, Maria )
• Syntactic and discourse-level constraints in native and non-native pronoun resolution (Applicant Felser, Claudia )
• The Interaction of Bayesian Pragmatics and Lexical Semantics in Linguistic Interpretation: Using Event-related Potentials to Investigate Probabilistic Predictions of Hearers (Applicant Werning, Markus )
• The Pragmatic Status of Iconic Meaning in Spoken Communication: Gestures, Ideophones, Prosodic Modulations (PSIMS) (Applicants Ebert, Cornelia ;  Fuchs, Susanne ;  Krifka, Manfred )
• The Semantics and Pragmatics of Conditional Connectives: cross-linguistic and experimental perspectives (Applicant Liu, Mingya )
• The What and When of Processing Projective Content (Applicant Holler, Anke )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Uli Sauerland, since 10/2018