Experimental Pragmatics: Advancing Theory and Method Special Session at the 27th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

Understanding how humans employ pragmatic principles to facilitate communication is an important element in understanding human interaction. Research in experimental pragmatics has shown marked recent theoretical progress. Current work successfully models not only contextual influences from linguistic structure and visually available context, but also factors such as the interlocutors involved, the world knowledge available to them as individuals and as they interact, and their mutually sustained beliefs and intentions. Recent progress in the field can be linked to researchers' ability to leverage novel methods, such as mining multi-interlocutor text interactions in social media, web-crawling language produced and understood via electronic means such as texting, internet blogs and other web-based platforms, and collecting data via Mechanical Turk. These approaches have expanded the available testable hypotheses as well as the diversity and representativeness of the language data under study. Pragmatics theorists have also been particularly open to incorporating insights from experimentally-generated results into developing theories of language interpretation. The 27th Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference, to be held in March 2014 at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, will include a Special Session on Experimental Pragmatics that aims to take stock of recent progress in this burgeoning sub-field and help to set the agenda for future research in this domain. The core of the special session is a series of invited talks by six prominent researchers, diverse with respect to gender and academic seniority, with relevant expertise. Together, the speakers represent a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches (corpus linguistics as well as experimental studies; language acquisition as well as adult processing; speech perception as well as the processing of quantifiers and anaphora). The special session promises to provide a fuller understanding of the operation of pragmatic influences and their interaction with other aspects of linguistic competence and performance that we believe will lead to a more realistic and representative picture of how the human mind represents and processes language.