Forschung BIXPrag
About our research
The Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics group focuses on the interpretation of meaning and uses experimental methods from psycholinguistics to investigate how complex meaning emerges in real time in language processing. We investigate incremental meaning construction from the sentence to the discourse level. The phenomena studied range from event interpretation to the interpretation of quantifiers to the interpretation of causality in language.
Questions here are:
- Do models from formal semantics and pragmatics possess cognitive reality?
- How can we integrate them into a processing model?
- And how can we explain the emergence of expectations about how a text or dialogue will develop?
To investigate these questions, we use a wide range of methods from interpretation and production tasks, to behavioral methods involving reaction time measurements, to measurements of eye movements while reading or viewing scenes during linguistic interpretation.
The WG is associated with the Departments of Linguistics and German as a second language and Foreign Language/Multilingualism.
Research Projects
- CRC 1646 Project Ö
The public relations project Ö will serve as a communication hub for the CRC Linguistic Creativity in Communication. The project’s tasks go well beyond common public relations work in a CRC due to the general public’s substantial involvement in the planned research program via citizen science activities and the planned research on science communication itself. We aim to actively involve interested citizens in the design, implementation, evaluation and results assessment of our projects through various participation formats. Citizens participating in the CRC’s research will thus gain insights into linguistic research and theorizing. All these activities will be carefully designed, implemented and scientifically monitored.
- CRC 1646 Project B01
B01 is concerned with the flexible adjustment of meaning in compositional interpretation. In particular, we're interested in potential compositional mismatches as they can be observed for complement coercion, where, for instance, begin a book is interpreted as reading or writing a book: Does the incremental interpretation of such mismatches constitute ordinary compositional processes or do they involve creative repair mechanisms? The project combines experimental semantic/pragmatic research with formal modelling of lexical semantics in composition, using large-scale, citizen-science offline data and online data from eyetracking during reading.
- Time course of processing of presuppositions (Bott et al.).
This project, subproject B2 of the SFB 833 "Constitution of Meaning" at the University of Tübingen, deals with the question of the role of presuppositions in language processing. Building on previous results, we formulate a model according to which listeners expect pragmatically well-formed utterances from a speaker. These expectations are used in processing to make predictions and are incrementally matched.
Oliver Bott was co-project manager of B2. Further information can be found here.