Indirectness in discourse: interrogatives, implicit meaning and incongruence (B03)

• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 512393437

B03 investigates how non-literal meaning emerges in indirectness within discourse. We examine indirect speech acts based on interrogatives and indirectness in question-response sequences (e.g. in interviews), adopting a cross-linguistic perspective including German, English and Japanese. Using various empirical sources, such as grammatical descriptions, experiments and corpus studies, we look at how formal syntactic factors (clause types) and the structure of discourse (questions-under-discussion) contribute to indirectness, which mechanisms allow for enrichment of conventional interpretation, and which contexts facilitate or limit such creative interpretation.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1646: Linguistic Creativity in Communication
• Applicant Institution: Universität Bielefeld
• Project Heads: Professorin Dr. Tanja Ackermann; Professorin Dr. Jutta M. Hartmann; Dr. Arndt Riester