Presentation
Aims
The EURO-XPRAG Network aims to support Experimental Pragmatic research through collaborations, workshops and conferences in order to provide leadership for this field worldwide. Many collaborations were begun through spontaneous workshops as well as through a series of Experimental Pragmatics conferences that have taken place biennially since 2003. The first workshop and one recent conference have led to edited volumes (Noveck & Sperber, 2004; Sauerland & Yatsushiro, 2009). For the moment, the network is supported by 10 member countries and includes researchers who are recognized independently for their work in Semantics, Pragmatics and Psychology.
The EURO-XPRAG Network draws on first rate expertise and access to advanced facilities. Linguistic expertise from diverse perspectives is directly present through its many members who are located in important centres for linguistic research throughout Europe. Given the experimental aspects, it is important to have facilities in the form of software, equipment and, in some cases, access to patients or other particular sorts of participants and the expertise to utilize these resources. This, too, is satisfied in each of the countries. The EURO-XPRAG Network is organized to lead to consistent interaction between theoretical researchers and those who have experimental expertise. Our aims are fourfold:
1) To get linguists more invested in experimentation and experimentalists in semantics and pragmatics;
2) To demonstrate how collaboration can energize a field;
3) To make Europe the recognized innovator and continuing leader of Experimental Pragmatics worldwide and, of course;
4) disseminate our findings and techniques.
The organization of the network aims to allow for a mixture of top-down and bottom-up processes. It is top-down in the sense that the Steering committee aims to maintain the general rhythm that has already been instituted over the last decade. This means conferences every two years and workshops in the intervening years. We are also introducing a summer school at the end of the fourth year. It is bottom-up in the sense that travel-grant programs will continue to encourage collaborations, especially among younger researchers, in order to keep the field vibrant. These innovative collaborations are expected to provide new material for the Workshops and International Conferences for years to come.
The running period of the ESF EURO-XPRAG Research Networking Programme is for four years from June 2009 to June 2013.
Theoretical background
Analyzing communication exchanges
Communication exchanges can often appear straightforward. For example, a dinner invitation or a request for the time can seem to follow a script. On closer inspection, however, human communication reveals itself as a deceptively complicated act. One central consideration is the intention behind the utterance. The receiver of a message has to take into account the message-sender’s intention and the message-sender has to take into account the capacities and interpretational abilities of the receiver. An invitation to dinner from a colleague would not have the same import as the same invitation from a stranger. Given the central role of language in most forms of communication, the words and their syntactic structure are extremely important to communication as well, but these are not completely determinative either. For example, while conventional meanings of the words “the”, “boys”, “are”, and “here” can be easily stated and while the structural composition of sentence (1) is straightforward, as an utterance it could still be used to communicate many different messages depending on the context.
(1) “The boys are here!”
Uttered by a father who’s been looking for his two lost sons it could be an expression of relief intended for his companion; uttered by a gangster, it could be the signal to engage in a fight or to flee. Countless other examples similarly reveal that understanding utterances requires, not only knowing the semantics of words and the syntax that structures them but, an understanding of pragmatics. Given the thorough context dependence of natural language meaning it becomes apparent that to provide the full picture of utterance interpretation one needs a theory of extra-linguistic processes such as inference, memory, attention, and so forth. This leads to the study of pragmatics which takes into account such factors while intersecting with linguistics.
Methodology
Adversarial Collaboration Workshops
Topic areas
Scalar Implicatures
For example, in one study five-year-old children and adults were shown three toy horses. Later, all of them were shown to jump over a fence. Interestingly, the five-year-olds were more likely than adults to agree with a puppet claiming:
(2) "Some of the horses jumped over the fence."
Adults are more likely to disagree, however, and reaction time studies show that adults require additional processing for scalar implicatures. Other reading-time and eye-tracking studies have since confirmed this result, which has proved important because it distinguishes between different theoretical approaches (for discussion, see Noveck & Sperber, 2004).
Presuppositions
Presupposition is one of the central phenomena of pragmatics, but except for some work on definite descriptions, there has been no formal experimental work on presuppositions. However, many of the experimental techniques developed for conversational implicatures can be applied to presuppositions as well and this research shows exciting promise.
Referential terms
Although at first sight the functioning of referential terms might seem a straightforward matter, it turns out that the interpretation of such terms involves intricate processes, in which a large number of linguistic and non-linguistic factors interact. Referential terms have been studied extensively in linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, but each discipline has concentrated on different aspects of the subject. For example, while syntactic and semantic constraints on coreference have received considerable attention, little is known about how these two classes of constraints relate to each other. EURO-XPRAG aims to develop a comprehensive and integrated processing theory of referential terms.
Metaphor and figurative uses
According to the so-called Standard Pragmatic Model of metaphor comprehension, a metaphor is first understood literally, leading to a reading that is false or at least very odd, and then understood with its intended meaning as the hearer carries out a second computation. For example, the following utterances would be rejected initially as being literally false, prompting a listener to ‘try again’ and infer the metaphorical interpretation:
(3) "That boxer is a creampuff."
Existing psycholinguistic work on metaphor has generally debunked the Standard Pragmatic Model (Glucksberg, 2001), giving rise to a different question: Are metaphoric readings as easy to integrate as literal readings? This issue is more controversial. EURO-XPRAG provides a path for the resolution for these apparent contradictions by joining theoretical and experimental researchers from various traditions.
Lexical Pragmatics
Lexical pragmatics is a rapidly developing branch of linguistics which investigates the processes by which linguistically-specified (‘literal’) word meanings are modified in use. Well-studied examples include lexical narrowing (e.g. drink used to mean ‘alcoholic drink’), approximation (e.g. square used to mean ‘squarish’) and metaphorical extension (e.g. battleaxe used to mean ‘frightening person’). There is evidence that such processes apply automatically. However, there is little interaction between formal pragmaticists (who are mainly interested in simplifying semantic description) and cognitive pragmaticists (who are interested in the mechanisms underlying verbal comprehension). EURO-XPRAG creates the foundations for interdisciplinary research by developing a framework in which the results of different approaches may be integrated.
With scalar implicatures as a kind of template, we have four main objectives:
• Systematically investigate the range of linguistic-pragmatic phenomena.
• Verify that experimental paradigms test semantic and pragmatic theory.
• Take measures from a variety of groups – normally developing children, healthy adults, and those affected by pathologies that touch language.
• Determine the on-line generation for each phenomenon as well as the neurophysiological activity that each inference evokes.
