The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics

Cummins, Christopher C.; Katsos, Napoleon

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198791768.001.0001

Cited by 26 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 622 publications

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“…Our results are relevant for pragmatic theories of referential communication since it has been argued that the redundant use of color adjectives results from speakers’ failure to take the listener’s perspective (for discussion, see Arnold, 2008; Davies & Arnold, 2019). However, if listeners establish color contrast incrementally and assign reference to an expression as soon as they have enough information to do so (rather than necessarily establishing a pragmatic contrast between category competitors), then redundant color adjectives are not “egocentric” or “noncontrastive,” but may in fact be rational, cooperative and efficient (Grice, 1975).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

Speakers and listeners exploit word order for communicative efficiency: A cross-linguistic investigation.

Rubio-Fernández¹,

Mollica²,

Jara‐Ettinger³

2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Pragmatic theories and computational models of reference must account for people's frequent use of redundant color adjectives (e.g., referring to a single triangle as 'the blue triangle'). The standard pragmatic view holds that the informativity of a referential expression depends on pragmatic contrast: color adjectives should be used to contrast competitors of the same kind to preempt an ambiguity (e.g., between two triangles of different colors), otherwise they are redundant. Here we propose an alternative to the standard view, the incremental efficiency hypothesis, according to which the efficiency of a referential expression must be calculated incrementally, over the entire visual context. This is the first theoretical account of referential efficiency that is sensitive to the incrementality of language processing, making different crosslinguistic predictions depending on word order. Experiment 1 confirmed that English speakers produced more redundant color adjectives (e.g., 'the blue triangle') than Spanish speakers (e.g., 'el triángulo azul'), but both language groups used more redundant color adjectives in denser displays where it would be more efficient. In Experiments 2a and 2b, we used eye tracking to show that pragmatic contrast is not a processing constraint. Instead, incrementality and efficiency determine that English listeners establish color contrast across categories (BLUE SHAPES > TRIANGULAR ONE), whereas Spanish listeners establish color contrast within a category (TRIANGLES > BLUE ONE). Spanish listeners, however, reversed their visual search strategy when tested in English immediately after. Our results show that speakers and listeners of different languages exploit word order to increase communicative efficiency.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

Speakers and listeners exploit word order for communicative efficiency: A cross-linguistic investigation.

Rubio-Fernández¹,

Mollica²,

Jara‐Ettinger³

2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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show abstract

“…Building on or amending Grice's insights, a variety of approaches have striven to capture how inferential processes give rise to pragmatic meanings (Carston, 1998;Goodman & Frank, 2016;Horn, 1984;Levinson, 2000;Sperber & Wilson, 1995, among others), 1 and much experimental work has explored the cognitive processes whereby such meanings are computed by interlocutors (Barner et al, 2011;Bott & Noveck, 2004;Breheny, 2019;Degen & Tanenhaus, 2015;Grodner et al, 2010;Huang & Snedeker, 2009a, 2009bNieuwland et al, 2010;Noveck, 2001;Papafragou & Musolino, 2003;Skordos & Papafragou, 2016).…”

Section: Pragmatic Inferences In Linguistic Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pragmatic violations affect social inferences about the speaker

Beltrama¹,

Papafragou²

2023

Glossa Psycholinguistics

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Listeners systematically extract two types of information from linguistic utterances: information about the world, and information about the speaker – i.e., their social background and personality. While both varieties of content have been widely investigated across different approaches to the study of language, research in pragmatics has mostly focused on the former kind. Here we ask how listeners reason about a speaker’s conversational choices to form an impression about their personality. In three experiments, we show that a speaker’s adherence to, or violation of, the pragmatic principles of Relevance and Informativeness, as well as the reasons underlying these violations, affect the evaluation of the speaker’s personality along the core social dimensions of Warmth and Competence. These findings highlight the value of enriching work in pragmatics with insights from sociolinguistics and social psychology about how people reason about human speech to draw inferences about the identity and personality of their interlocutors.

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Experimental Pragmatics

Holtgraves¹

2023

The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

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Experimental techniques (e.g., reaction time and EEG) are now frequently used to study a variety of pragmatic phenomena. In this entry, an overview of how these techniques have been used to empirically examine how adults comprehend nonliteral meaning is provided. The specific pragmatic phenomena reviewed include indirect requests, indirect replies, figures of speech (metaphors and idioms), scalar expressions, politeness, speech act recognition, and reference. The use of experimental techniques has and will continue to contribute to the refinement of pragmatic theories.

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The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics

Cited by 26 publications

References 622 publications

Speakers and listeners exploit word order for communicative efficiency: A cross-linguistic investigation.

Speakers and listeners exploit word order for communicative efficiency: A cross-linguistic investigation.

Pragmatic violations affect social inferences about the speaker

Experimental Pragmatics

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