SFB 1718:  Common Ground: Cognition - Grammar - Communication

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Biology ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 538184825

Common ground is essential for successfully coordinating and carrying out any joint activity. At the level of large-scale social interaction, notions of CG are useful for understanding social dynamics, or public opinion formation. At the level of dyadic interaction, more fine-grained aspects of CG help explain nuanced phenomena relating to linguistically-oriented communication (LC), among other things. Despite its importance and centrality to many issues in many academic fields, the notion of common ground is highly elusive. This CRC is a multi-disciplinary effort, anchored in linguistics, towards a better understanding, wider applicability and empirical validation of notions of CG. Our research program is driven by the conviction that the explanatory potential behind the concept of CG can best be sharpened by a methodologically and conceptually diverse approach, but also that linguistics provides one of the clearest sources of data for a methodologically stringent investigation of CG, from which one can expand to neighboring disciplines. The proposed CRC is therefore structured around three core areas – Cognition, Grammar, and Communication – and brings together researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds, including theoretical and computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychology, rhetoric, literary studies, and biological anthropology. This joint endeavor will strengthen the role of linguistics as a potential link between different fields interested in language and linguistic communication. Our long-term objective is to create an integrative model of CG, rooted in linguistic theory and tested against empirical data, which can serve as a unifying, explanatory conceptual framework for many disparate phenomena and puzzles about language, linguistic communication, and social interaction. Our long-term strategy is anchored in three foci: variation, unification, and testing. The challenges we are facing in our first funding phase are connected to variation across different domains: (A) the heterogeneity of information, its processing, and its representation within the CG, (B) the variety of linguistic devices that are able to update and manage the CG, and (C) the diverse communicative settings in which CG is established, as well as the epistemic relations of agents to the CG. These three areas are also highly intertwined. For the organization of research across areas A to C, as well as for the evaluation and integration of the areas’ results, two ‘cross-area’ platforms will be implemented. One platform will be concerned with the evaluation of theoretical concepts (RP1 – Theory) and the other with the evaluation of empirical methods (RP2 – Methodology).

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres

Current projects

• A01 - Probabilistic Reasoning about Common Ground (Project Heads Franke, Michael ;  Snider, Todd )
• A02 - Shared Prior Background within Common Ground: Semantic vs. World Knowledge (Project Heads Kaup, Barbara ;  Maienborn, Claudia )
• A03 - Common Ground Make-Up: Attitudes and Types of Propositional Information (Project Head Müller, Kalle )
• A04 - Multimodality, Iconicity and the Common Ground: The Status of Speech and Gesture (Project Heads Barnes, Kathryn ;  Ebert, Cornelia ;  Stolterfoht, Britta )
• A05 - Linguistic vs. Non-Linguistic Common Ground (Project Heads Kaup, Barbara ;  Leuthold, Hartmut ;  Ulrich, Rolf )
• A06 - Developing Common Ground across Age and Language Proficiency (Project Heads Friedrich, Claudia ;  Weber, Andrea )
• A07 - Modeling Great Ape Signaling Behavior: Evolutionary Roots of Common Ground (Project Heads Bohn, Manuel ;  Franke, Michael ;  Fröhlich, Marlen )
• B01 - Lexical Common Ground Management: Particles in Processing and Diachronic Development (Project Heads Axel-Tober, Katrin ;  Stolterfoht, Britta )
• B02 - Common-Ground-Management-Interaktionen: Romanische Evidentialitätsmarker (Project Head Menendez Benito, Paula )
• B03 - Spanish Mitigators: How to Switch Non-Default Common Ground Updates (Project Heads Hennecke, Inga ;  Mihatsch, Wiltrud )
• B04 - Mirativity and Common Ground Updates in Romance Languages (Project Heads Dessì Schmid, Sarah ;  Wiesinger, Evelyn )
• B05 - Clarifying the Common Ground: A Cross-Linguistic Investigation of the Form and Pragmatic Function of Reprise Questions and Reprise Fragments (Project Head Griffiths, Ph.D., James )
• B06 - Syntax Interacts with Common Ground: Non-Canonical Inversion Structures (Project Heads Axel-Tober, Katrin ;  Featherston, Samuel ;  Winkler, Susanne )
• C01 - Construction and Destruction of Common Ground in Polarized Political Discourse (Project Heads Kehl, Andreas ;  Kramer, Olaf ;  Winkler, Susanne )
• C02 - Signaling and Interpreting Defectivity in Common Ground: Face-to-Face, Voice-Only, and Text-Only Communication (Project Head Cöltekin, Cagri )
• C03 - Strategic Common Ground Updates: How Pragmatic Inferences are Used in Public Discourse (Project Heads Dang-Anh, Mark ;  Rapp, Irene )
• C04 - Understanding Irony through the Theory of Common Ground (Project Heads Achimova, Asya ;  Jäger, Gerhard )
• C05 - Multiple Common Grounds – Linguistic Mechanisms for Literary Meaning (Project Heads Bauer, Matthias ;  Beck, Sigrid ;  Zirker, Angelika )
• S - Methodological Support and Research Data Management (Project Heads Hörnig, Robin ;  Kaup, Barbara ;  Stolterfoht, Britta )
• Z - Central Tasks of the Collaborative Research Center (Project Head Stolterfoht, Britta )
• Ö - Science Communication Practices and the Dynamics of Common Ground (Project Heads Gese, Helga ;  Kramer, Olaf )

• Applicant Institution: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
• Participating Institution: Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS)
• Participating University: Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main; Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
• Spokesperson: Professorin Dr. Britta Stolterfoht