Members BIXPrag

Prof. Dr. Oliver Bott

Oliver Bott is the head of the working group. As a linguist and psychologist, he has been working on experimental semantics and pragmatics for many years. His research initially focused primarily on the compositional processing of sentences, but in recent years this focus of research has shifted more and more towards the question of what role the utterance and discourse context has on compositional interpretation. In his research, his primary concern is to test findings from theoretical semantics and pragmatics for the extent to which they underlie cognitive processes that can in turn be measured in psycholinguistic experiments. The central phenomena considered are core objects of semantics and pragmatics - at the same time they also represent fundamental cognitive categories.

Dr. Torgrim Solstad

After holding positions at universities and research institutions in Oslo, Stuttgart, Trondheim, and Berlin, Torgrim Solstad joined the Experimental Pragmatics working group in January 2020. As a theoretical linguist, he has worked on a wide range of topics - from lexical semantics to the syntax-semantics interface to discourse structure. On the empirical side, the linguistic expression of causation relations has been a common denominator. While formal modeling and empirical breadth have always been major desiderata, the experimental approach to semantics and pragmatics has come to play an increasingly important role in his research in recent years. A major focus has been on how expectations arise in language processing: What linguistic entities trigger them, how can they be modeled, and how do they affect processing locally and globally?