Project Details
Projekt
Pragmatic reasoning with (non-)visual alternatives
Applicant
Dr. Nadine Bade
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term
since 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 502009090
The project explores the role of visual alternatives in pragmatic reasoning using experimental methods. The focus will be on their impact on deriving non-literal meanings such as (presuppositional) implicatures and triggering presuppositions. In one part of the project, novel priming methods will be used to distinguish visual from linguistic alternatives. Participants will be exposed to pictures or sentences only which draw attention to different components of the sentence. The goal is to see whether visual alternatives are subject to the same constraints regarding complexity and salience as linguistic alternatives, thereby informing theories of alternatives, and models of pragmatic strengthening incorporating visual information.A second part of the project will focus on the triggering problem for presuppositions: why do presuppositions exist, and how they come about? To address this question the goal is to develop novel experimental paradigm combing a word learning task with visual animations. In a first, the learning, phase participants will be taught a new word "wugging" by seeing animation depicting its usage. Specifically, they see a green dot moving upwards from a red line. In a second, the testing, phase they will be tested on their understanding of the word. They will be shown animations again, some only showing movement from the red line, but downwards, some showing movement upwards but not from the red line. The question is whether any of those are still considered "wugging", and what part of "wugging" might be presupposed. If the method proves to be successful it will be further refined to study properties of the meanings that are more likely to presupposed. The goal is to test existing theories of presupposition triggering.In sum, both parts of the project have a theoretical and empirical goals. The first part is to refine models and theories of pragmatic inferences by incorporating visual communication. The second is to study the properties of the visual information channel in experiments to be able to establish new visual methods for exploring pragmatic inferences further.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
