Modeling meaning-driven register variation: Politeness and face management (A05)

• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 416591334

Project A05 investigates intra-speaker variation of alternatives that differ in their core logical or semantic content. In Phase II, A05 addresses the empirical domain of politeness, focusing on three classes of register phenomena: polite requests, evaluative language, and honorification. The central goals are i) to systematically collect empirical data of how and why speakers choose and hearers construe particular alternatives, ii) to develop probabilistic game-theoretic models of speaker choices that predict the empirical data in relation to linguistic, social and contextual parameters, and iii) to work out general mechanisms of speaker choices across politeness-related phenomena.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1412: Register: Language-Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation
• Applicant Institution: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Project Heads: Professor Dr. Uli Sauerland; Dr. Stephanie Solt, Ph.D.