Processing speaker's meaning: Epistemic state, cooperation, commitment

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Petra Schumacher
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2014 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 254822891

• Final Report Year: 2023

Final Report Abstract

The project investigated the real-time processing of speaker meaning, i.e. the identification and, if necessary, reconstruction of the speaker's intention. On the one hand, pragmatic phenomena were considered that require meaning adaptation and expansion in a variety of ways, such as so-called privative adjectives (a fake ID), graduable adjectives (relative: big elephant vs. big mouse; absolute: wet shirt vs. wet dog), too-excessives (Tom is too heavy) as well as metonymic uses (German politicians instrumentalized Fukushima), and also expressions expressing the speaker’s attitude, such as epithets (the diva) or the adversative connector (but). Another focus was on the role of the speaker's perspective. Here, similarities and differences in the processing of different implicatures and inferences were identified. On the other hand, a unified, neurocognitively plausible model of the comprehension of pragmatic aspects of meaning was developed. Pragmatic processing reflects general processes of discourse comprehension and confirms earlier findings on the construction of a mental representation. Thereby, a continuous interplay of predictive processes and discourse updating processes is revealed.

Publications

• Metonymie und Text. In: Maximilian Mengeringhaus & Kathrin Schuchmann. (Eds.) Schliff Literaturzeitschrift N°3. Düsseldorf: Edition Virgines, 153-161
  Schumacher, Petra B.
  
• Pragmatics: Theory and Experiment Growing Together . Linguistische Berichte (LB), 2016(245), 3-24.
  Sauerland, Uli & Schumacher, Petra B.
  
• Artist-for-work metonymy. The Mental Lexicon, 12(2), 219-233.
  Weiland-Breckle, Hanna & Schumacher, Petra B.
  
• Semantic‐Pragmatic Processing. The Handbook of Psycholinguistics (c(2017, 9, 22)), 392-410. Wiley.
  Schumacher, Petra B.
  
• Special Collection: Perspective Taking. Glossa, 2, 1
  Hinterwimmer, Stefan & Petra B. Schumacher (Eds.)
  
• 16 .Schnittstelle Semantik-Pragmatik. Grammatiktheorie und Empirie in der germanistischen Linguistik (c(2018, 7, 9)), 471-510. De Gruyter.
  Gutzmann, Daniel & Schumacher, Petra B.
  
• A direct comparison of metonymic and metaphoric relations in adjective–noun pairs. Acta Linguistica Academica, 65(2-3), 443-472.
  Weiland-Breckle, Hanna & Schumacher, Petra B.
  
• Complement coercion in Polish and the role of selectional restrictions revealed in a self-paced reading study. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21, Vol. 2, 1141–1158. University of Edinburgh
  Spalek, Alexandra Anna & Tomaszewicz, Barbara Maria
  
• Experimentelle Pragmatik. Handbuch Pragmatik (2018), 113-121. J.B. Metzler.
  Schumacher, Petra B.
  
• On type composition and agentivity. Theoretical Linguistics, 44(1-2), 81-91.
  Schumacher, Petra B.
  
• Online Processing of “Real” and “Fake”: The Cost of Being Too Strong. Language, Cognition, and Mind (2018), 93-111. Springer International Publishing.
  Schumacher, Petra B.; Brandt, Patrick & Weiland-Breckle, Hanna
  
• Event-related potentials in pragmatic priming. Neuroscience Letters, 712(c(2019, 11)), 134435.
  Rees, Alice; Bott, Lewis & Schumacher, Petra B.
  
• Metonymy. The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics (c(2019, 5, 9)), 316-330. Oxford University Press.
  Schumacher, Petra B.
  
• Vagueness and context-sensitivity of absolute gradable adjectives. Snippets (37), 90-92.
  Schumacher, Petra B.
  
• It is not always a matter of time: Addressing the costs of metaphor and metonymy through a speed-accuracy trade-off study.. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale, 75(2), 189-196.
  Bambini, Valentina; Bott, Lewis & Schumacher, Petra B.
  
• The Cost of the Epistemic Step: Investigating Scalar Implicatures in Full and Partial Information Contexts. Frontiers in Psychology, 12(c(2021, 7, 19)).
  Spychalska, Maria; Reimer, Ludmila; Schumacher, Petra B. & Werning, Markus
  
• Too strong argument structures and (un-)prepared repair. The Syntax of Argument Structure (c(2021, 10, 25)), 13-32. De Gruyter.
  Brandt, Patrick & Schumacher, Petra B.
  
• Tracking meaning evolution in the brain: Processing consequences of conventionalization. American Geophysical Union (AGU).
  Schumacher Petra B., Weiland-Breckle Hanna & Reul Guendalina, Brilmayer Ingmar