Third-call grants
Varieties of lexical adjustment
Stavros Assimakopoulos, Lewis Bott, Julio Santiago de Torres & John Tomlinson
According to the Gricean paradigm (1989), pragmatically derived interpretations are in principle sought only after the linguistically encoded content is deemed inadequate to fulfill the speaker’s informative intention...
Common Ground and Granularity of Referring Expressions
Dale Barr, Raquel Fernandez & Kees van Deemter
Speakers can refer to the same entities in may different ways. For instance, a speaker may choose to refer to a dog simply with the expression ‘dog’ or with the more specific expression ‘poodle’; she may choose to refer..
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Do 2.5-year-olds understand presupposition? An eye-tracking study of the discourse particles too and again
Frauke Berger & Nausicaa Pouscoulous
Pragmatic inferences appear to develop later than other linguistic abilities (e.g., Noveck, 2001 for implicatures and Gibbs, 1994, for a review on metaphor and irony). Recently, it has been shown that young children’s...
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Are Presuppositions Accommodated Globally by Default?
Richard Breheny, Emmanuel Chemla, Chris Cummins, Bart Geurts & Napoleon Katsos
Presupposition projection is one of the key areas of research for theoretical semantics and pragmatics. The phenomenon can be illustrated by considering the implications of (1): 1. The Martian geologists did not...
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The role of lexical alternatives in different forms of pragmatic processing
Judith Degen & Richard Breheny
Recent experimental literature in scalar implicature processing has focused strongly on the time course of scalar implicature processing (Bott & Noveck (2004), Breheny et al (2006)). More specifically, the question...
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An experimental investigation of long-distance indefinites in English and German
Cornelia Ebert, Tania Ionin & Britta Stolterfoht
Indefinites have always been a central topic in investigations of the semantics-pragmatics interface. New insights about the behaviour of indefinites, in particular about their anaphoric and discourse properties...
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The role of stereotypes in irony comprehension in autism spectrum disorders
Francesca Ervas, Kasia Bromberek-Dyzman & Tiziana Zalla
Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) usually show difficulties in understanding non-literal speech, such as sarcasm and jokes (Happé 1991), as well as simile, metaphor and irony (Happé 1991, 1993). In this...
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Testing theories of irony processing using eye-tracking and ERPs
Ruth Filik & Hartmut Leuthold
Despite the fact that the use of irony is very common in everyday utterances, most empirical research on figurative language has concentrated on metaphor, with very little work investigating the underlying...
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The pragmatics of attitude ascription
Susanne Grassmann, Bart Geurts & Paula Rubio-Fernández
One of the defining characteristics of our species is that we are constantly concerned with one another’s propositional attitudes: beliefs, desires, intentions, and so on. This phenomenon has been widely studied and..
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Is Only Special?
Jacques Jayez & Bob van Tiel
Classic presentations of presuppositions (PP’s) highlight their projective character. A piece of information is said to project whenever its truth persists across different environments, including for instance sentential...
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Do you see what I’m thinking about? How adults’ eye-movements are influenced by representations of mental states
Paula Rubio‐Fernandez, Stephen Butterfill & Daniel Richardson
Following recent eye-tracking research on perspective-taking and false-belief reasoningin adults (Keysar, Lin & Barr, 2003; Ferguson, Scheepers & Sanford, 2010; Rubio-Fernandez & Glucksberg, under review), we...
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Vagueness and the Semantics and Pragmatics of Contradictions
Uli Sauerland, Peter Pagin, Samer Al Khatib & Stephanie Solt
Vagueness of meaning is a central phenomenon of natural language. But modern linguistic semantics and pragmatics are still struggling to incorporate vagueness into compositional accounts of meaning to capture...
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Processing Presuppositions of German Wieder (“Again”)
Florian Schwarz & Sonja Tiemann
While the recent literature has seen a renewed peak in discussion of theoretical frameworks for the analysis of presuppositions, together with consideration of ever more intricate data (see Schlenker 2010 and Beaver and..
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The Preference for Approximation
Stephanie Solt, Chris Cummins & Marijan Palmovic
When communicating numerical information, speakers have a choice between expressions that differ in their level of precision or granularity. For example, the distance between Vienna and Amsterdam might be ...
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The acquisition of focus: Production and Comprehension
Kriszta Szendroi, Judit Gervain & Barbara Höhle
Focus in natural language has an important communicative function. Different definitions of focus are available in the literature. Some take it to be the part of an utterance that answers a corresponding wh- question...
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A cross-linguistic analysis of the acquisition and processing of epistemic relations
Sara Verbrugge, Sandrine Zufferey, Pim Mak & Ted Sanders
Without much risk of overstatement, we may claim that all languages of the world provide their speakers with means to indicate causal relationships (Sanders & Sweetser 2009). Causal relations between discourse...
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