First-call grants
Steps of the mind over figurative meanings: Behavioral and ERP investigations
Valentina Bambini & Petra B. Schumacher (Referee: Ira Noveck)
This project focuses on the temporal dynamics of pragmatic processing of figurative uses of language, such as metaphor and metonymy. Its main interest concerns the way the construction of communicated meaning...
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Negative polarity: Licensing conditions and connections to scalar implicatures
Emmanuel Chemla, Vincent Homer & Daniel Rothschild
Negative polarity items (NPIs) are a class of lexical items or phrases (including, ‘ever’, ‘any’, ‘lift a finger’) whose grammatical acceptability is sensitive to semantic features of their linguistic environment. It has long...
The acquisition of discourse pragmatics: the case of personal pronouns
Martine Coene & Larisa Avram
With respect to nominal expressions, fine-grained hierarchies have been proposed reflecting the degree of discourse accessibility of the entity they refer to, be it in the verbal or non-verbal context. As such, there is...
A constraint-based approach to the meaning and use of quantified expressions
Chris Cummins, Stephanie Solt & Uli Sauerland
Theoretical and experimental research in semantics and pragmatics has made a substantial contribution to the understanding of number terms. For instance, the apparent polysemy of bare numerals (their exact, “at...[pdf]
You are “the only one”...how far do we go in search for referents?
Francesca Foppolo & Luisa Meroni (Referee: Andrea Gualmini)
Our project builds on some findings by Crain, Ni and Conway (1994) on the different parsing strategies adopted by children and adults in solving ambiguities related to the phenomenon of “one-substitution”...
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Early competence with inferential communication
Napoleon Katsos & Gerlinde Grosse (Referee: Ira Noveck)
Human infants from as early as 14 months of age display competence with a range of skills that are required for Gricean reasoning, such as attributing and monitoring intentions, tracking their interlocutor’s epistemic...
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Early metaphorical abilities
Nausicaa Pouscoulous & Michael Tomasello
Metaphor development has been investigated extensively in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of these experimental studies suggest that children do not understand metaphors until fairly late in development, and often not...
Relevance implicature comprehension in 3-year-olds
Cornelia Schulze, Susanne Grassmann, Nausicaa Pouscoulous & Richard Breheny
In every-day conversation, speakers often intend to mean other things than they actually say. Thus, listeners need to make inferences and go beyond the sentences said. Consider for example a child holding a packet of...
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