Project Details
Projekt
Reconsidering the epistemic step: The role of speaker and listener perspectives for the processing of quantity and temporal implicatures
Applicant
Dr. Maria Spychalska
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term
from 2017 to 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 366639214
In Gricean pragmatics the derivation of conversation implicatures involves reasoning about the epistemic state of the speaker (her set of beliefs and knowledge). For instance, the assumption that the speaker is competent is essential for deriving the scalar implicature of the quantifier . In contrast, implicatures related to disjunctions seem to involve the assumption that the speaker is epistemically ignorant. The goal of project is to directly investigate the role of the information about the epistemic state of the speaker for pragmatic processing. The main question addressed is whether this epistemic information about the speaker is incrementally processed by the listener and whether it plays any role for the truth-conditional sentence evaluation. The project focuses in particular on the generalized implicatures related to logical terms. In the first part I investigate quantity implicatures, especially, the implicature and implicatures related to disjuctions. In the second part I focus on temporal implicatures of conjunctive sentence. A novel experimental paradigm is introduced, where the implicature processing is tested in context of partial information. The paradigms employ pseudo-game situations with multiple agents (player vs. speaker), where only partial information about the model is available to the speaker, or both to the speaker and the listener. To investigate the role of the epistemic information in the processing of the speaker meaning, the method of event-related brain potentials is used. Temporal implicatures are further investigated in contexts where the discourse relation between events is determined by world knowledge. To this aim a paradigm is developed that uses a visual presentation of real-life activities that are related or unrelated to each other. Combining the findings on implicatures related to different maxims (Quantity and Manner), I aim to look from a broader perspective at the role of the epistemic reasoning in pragmatics.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
