Publications

Abstract

Pragmatic phenomena are characterized by extreme variability, which makes it difficult to draw sound generalizations about the role of social cognition in pragmatic language by and large. I introduce cultural evolutionary pragmatics as a new framework for the study of the interdependence between language and social cognition, and point at the study of common-ground management across languages and ages as a way to test the reliance of pragmatic language on social cognition. I illustrate this new research line with three experiments on article use by second language speakers, whose mother tongue lacks articles. These L2 speakers are known to find article use challenging and it is often argued that their difficulties stem from articles being pragmatically redundant. Contrary to this view, the results of this exploratory study support the view that proficient article use requires automatizing basic socio-cognitive processes, offering a window into the interdependence between language and social cognition.

Abstract

How might social cognition help us communicate through language? At what levels does this interaction occur? In classical views, social cognition is independent of language, and integrating the two can be slow, effortful, and error-prone. But new research into word level processes reveals that communication
is brimming with social micro-processes that happen in real time, guiding even the simplest choices like how we use adjectives, articles, and demonstratives. We interpret these findings in the context of advances in theoretical models of social cognition and propose a Communicative Mind-Tracking
framework, where social micro-processes aren’t a secondary process in how we use language—they are fundamental to how communication works.

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the extent to which the process of lexical interpretation is context dependent. It has been uncontroversially agreed in psycholinguistics that interpretation is always affected by sentential context. The major debate in lexical processing research has revolved around the question of whether initial semantic activation is context sensitive or rather exhaustive, that is, whether the effect of context occurs before or only after the information associated to a concept has been accessed from the mental lexicon. However, within post-lexical access processes, the question of whether the selection of a word's meaning components is guided exclusively by contextual relevance, or whether certain meaning components might be selected context independently, has not been such an important focus of research. I have investigated this question in the two experiments reported in this paper and, moreover, have analysed the role that context-independent information in concepts might play in word interpretation. This analysis differs from previous studies on lexical processing in that it places experimental work in the context of a theoretical model of lexical pragmatics.

Abstract

Various accounts of metaphor interpretation propose that it involves constructing an ad hoc concept on the basis of the concept encoded by the metaphor vehicle (i.e. the expression used for conveying the metaphor). This paper discusses some of the differences between these theories and investigates their main empirical prediction: that metaphor interpretation involves enhancing properties of the metaphor vehicle that are relevant for interpretation, while suppressing those that are irrelevant. This hypothesis was tested in a cross-modal lexical priming study adapted from early studies on lexical ambiguity. The different patterns of suppression of irrelevant meanings observed in disambiguation studies and in the experiment on metaphor reported here are discussed in terms of differences between meaning selection and meaning construction.