For students

This course teaches the basics of semantics and pragmatics. The first half of the semester deals with the context-independent meaning of words and sentences. In the second half of the semester, linguistic meaning in concrete contexts of utterance will be dealt with, building on these basics. Central pragmatic concepts such as presuppositions, conversational implicatures, information structure, and speech acts will be discussed.

This seminar will deal with central phenomena of semantics and pragmatics already introduced in the lecture "Semantics and Pragmatics". In contrast to the lecture, however, this time the topic will be approached from a cognitive science/psycholinguistic perspective. Exemplary experimental studies will be discussed that show how theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics cross-fertilize each other in the relatively new research area of experimental semantics and pragmatics. The seminar is situated at the intersection of the three profiles and is intended to assist in profile selection.

Sentence comprehension is a classical field of research in psycholinguistics. It is concerned with the cognitive processes that underlie our ability to understand complex sentences automatically and, for the most part, effortlessly. The main focus in this research field is on how syntactic structure building and semantic interpretation occurs in real time, that is, while we are listening to or reading sentences.

A research tradition now spanning more than 50 years has provided a broad empirical basis for this, and a whole range of processing models exist that accurately capture this process. In this seminar, we will look at a wide range of models of sentence comprehension, from classical to current news. The role of the underlying cognitive processes will be intensively discussed.

The seminar provides an overview of how we talk about localization in space and how the spatial expressions used to do so are processed.

Well-formed discourses are characterized, among other things, by the fact that they are coherent and structured according to certain rules. The individual sentences or utterances of a discourse are not strung together at random, but relate to one another in terms of content. Thus, the sentences in the minitext Peter was frightened. Maria suddenly stood in front of him are not understood as isolated facts, but are preferably identified as effect and cause of a causal (discourse) relation: Peter was frightened because Mary suddenly stood in front of him. For the underlying processes of inference, both linguistic means and world knowledge play an essential role.

In the seminar, central aspects of discourse coherence such as discourse relations/rhetorical relations and anaphoric reference will be treated mainly from a theoretical-linguistic but also from a psycholinguistic perspective. Important methodological tools for the study of discourse coherence (and its processing) will also be addressed, including (independent) work with discourse annotations and annotated corpora.

This master seminar introduces formal semantics and pragmatics. Approaches from dynamic semantics will be used to deal with the following linguistic phenomena, starting from classical semantic questions: Anaphora in discourse, presuppositions, implicatures, discourse relations, information structure and Questions under Discussion (QuDs), and modeling dialogue structure.

The seminar provides an overview of current research in experimental pragmatics. On the basis of experimental work on the acquisition and processing of scalar implicatures, we will deal with the question of how this type of implicature can be theoretically grasped.

The phenomenon of scalar implicature is particularly pertinent because of recent intensive psycholinguistic research comparing pragmatic approaches (Grice's implicature theory and relevance theory) with grammatical approaches (deaultism). Moreover, within the framework of probabilistic pragmatics, new explanations have been developed that formally reconceptualize the semantics/pragmatics interface. The interplay between semantic/pragmatic theory on the one hand, and experimental evidence on the other, can be seen as paradigmatic for recent pragmatic research.

The notion of presupposition plays an essential role in theoretical research on linguistic meaning. In recent research, this theoretical work has been complemented by experimental approvals of presuppositional meaning. This empirical research provides important insight into how sentence information and contextual information interact in language processing.

Pragmatic approaches to presupposed meaning commonly anchor it in the common ground between communicative partners. A growing body of experimental work is concerned with the mechanisms involved in the establishment of the Common Ground. Of particular interest has been the question of audience design, i.e., whether we fully represent our counterpart and his or her mental states when processing speech - or whether we proceed in a rather egocentric way.

This seminar will provide an overview of the current state of research in these two areas, which are central to experimental pragmatics. In addition to studies in healthy adults, studies of the pragmatic abilities of clinical populations will be discussed.

In many communicative situations, we have a strong feeling that we can predict what the participants in the conversation will say next. Psycholinguistic research has shown that such expectations arise for a range of phenomena and that violations of such expectations directly affect our language processing. For example, for sentences like The day was breezy so the boy went outside to fly ... it has been investigated to what extent the (possible) continuation a kite is expected so strongly that even the occurrence of the article form an, which is morphophonologically incompatible with kite, leads to processing difficulties.

The seminar will focus on empirical work on expectations in language processing, but will also address the question of the linguistic and cognitive anchoring of such expectations. For example, we will discuss where expectations come from, why they exist, whether expectations must always occur, and also take a look at how non-linguistic factors such as stereotypical world knowledge and mind can influence our expectations.

In the seminar, the linguistic expression of causality in sentence and discourse is treated against the background of philosophical, linguistic, cognitive-psychological and computational approaches.