The Erotetic and the Aesthetic

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Tilmann Köppe
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 441917136

The project investigates the emergence of suspense in literary narratives in an innovative interdisciplinary setting. Suspense has generally been a topic of narratology as well as psychology and cognitive science. The project takes a new perspective onto this topic by exploring the idea that suspense is determined by the interpretation of a text to which the reader arrives. Since the interpretation of a text is pobabilistically driven by the linguistic material the text consists of, the project capitalizes on linguistic analyses of texts, accompanied by experimental investigations on the emergence of interpretative features and by narratological theorizing regarding higher level interpretive features. The core theoretical framework is discourse semantics, especially focusing on erotetic structure of text and on-line evocation of questions during the reading process. In addition, we adopt a Bayesian perspective on communication and the emergence of interpretive effects in narratives.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Victor Edgar Onea Gáspár