Action sensitivity in grammar

• Applicant: Professor Hedde Zeijlstra, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 463357133

But what are intentions and how do they manifest themselves in human behaviour? Philosophy and psychology have pondered over these questions for centuries and come to the consensus that our capacity to intend and, more importantly, recognize and share intentions of others constitutes the foundation for social behaviour. Natural languages have multiple ways to mark the presence or absence of intentions ranging from a dedicated ‘out-of-control’ morpheme in Lillooet (Salish) and different case marking for subjects of intentional and unintentional actions in Hindi/Urdu to the availability of a co-referential interpretation in subjunctive constructions and nuanced distribution of polarity sensitive indefinites in European languages. It would seem that understanding how natural languages express intentions is a pressing task for linguistics. However, modulo a few notable exceptions, manifestations of intentions in natural languages have mostly been understudied in linguistics. The project is the first systematic inquiry into the issue. Its goal is to answer two principal questions: How is the presence or absence of intentions encoded in natural languages? and Why is it encoded in these particular ways?The first question is addressed by establishing an empirical landscape of linguistic manifestations of intentions across different languages via series of experimental studies and data elicitation inquiries. This empirical contribution to the problem will be useful not only to theoretical linguists interested in the topic, but also to researchers in experimental philosophy and diagnostic psychology. The second question is addressed by developing a theoretical model that explains the effect of interpreting an action as intentional or accidental on the meaning of the sentence and all its composite parts. This model will be an integral part of our representation of the language faculty because manifestations of intentions have been discovered in different domains of the grammar.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Thomas Weskott