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SPP 1727:  XPrag.de: New Pragmatic Theories Based on Experimental Evidence

Subject Area Humanities
Medicine
Social and Behavioural Sciences
Term from 2014 to 2024
Website Homepage
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 237157834
 
This Priority Programme is a national research network, where linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers together pursue the overall goal to develop a precise pragmatic theory that is grounded in the understanding of language processing. By formulating pragmatic models based on cognitive mechanisms and their evaluation with experimental methods, the advancement of pragmatic theory should be enhanced. In the current first phase, 16 projects are funded.
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics that deals with speaker meaning, i.e., with what is meant (and not primarily with what is literally said). This meaning may depend among others on the context or the situation. An example are so-called implicatures: The sentence "Peter has three children" would, in principle, also be true in a situation in which Peter has four children. But since the listener assumes that the speaker is as informative as possible, she concludes, i.e., she draws the implicature, that Peter has no more than three children.
Another example are meaning shifts like in expressions of the type "The steak at Table 7 asks for the bill" where "steak" is not used in its literal meaning (food), but refers to a customer who has ordered a steak. So the listener interprets what is said (steak) depending on the specific situation in which there is a customer who ordered a steak.
Phenomena of this kind (and others such as vague expressions, projective meaning, metaphors and coercion, but also speaker intentions, presuppositions and anaphoric references) are investigated experimentally and modelled theoretically in the projects involved in this Priority Programme. Different types of populations are tested - children, adults, speakers with language disorders and second language learners. In addition, different languages - e.g., German, English, Hungarian and Sign language - are investigated.
DFG Programme Priority Programmes
International Connection Austria, China, United Kingdom, USA

Projects

Spokesperson Professor Dr. Uli Sauerland, since 10/2018
 
 

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