Dynamic pragmatics for multiagent conversations

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Daniel Gutzmann; Professorin Dr. Katharina Turgay
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 573920686

Dynamic pragmatic theories model both the influence and the constraints that the context of utterance places on an utterance, as well as the effect that utterances have on the context. In addition to the common ground model, the concept of the question under discussion (QUD) and the so-called table model have established themselves as key frameworks in formally oriented semantics and pragmatics for formalizing utterance contexts. These theories are, at least implicitly, based on a “monocontextualism”: there is *one* context and, accordingly, *one* Common Ground (CG), *one* QUD, and *one* contextual Table (CT) for a given utterance. This project examines the limits of this assumption by focusing on multi-agentive conversations – that is, linguistic interactions involving more than one speaker and one hearer. The project will demonstrate, for each of the three components, that in many multi-agentive conversations it is necessary to assume that more than one CG, QUD, and CT must be active simultaneously in order to adequately model the context-update effects and contextual interpretation of utterances. This leads to a pragmatic multicontextualism: an utterance can be associated with more than one pragmatic context. In subsequent phases, the project will thus extend the formal-dynamic models of CG, QUD, and CT so that they can also account for more complex conversations beyond idealized dialogues, exploring the advantages and disadvantages of different strategies of extension. These three extensions will be integrated into a unified theory of dynamic pragmatics for multi-agentive conversation. The theoretical analysis will not only rely on constructed interactions but also on authentic corpus data, which will be analyzed using an annotation scheme specifically developed for the project. As a “stretch goal,” the project will address more complex telemediated and asymmetric contexts in which speakers and addressees do not have the same conversational possibilities, potentially building a bridge to discourse linguistics.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants