«On investigating intention in experimental pragmatics»

Ira Noveck
«On investigating intention in experimental pragmatics»
Pre-proceedings of Trends in Experimental Pragmatics. Workshop at Center for General Linguistics. Berlin, Germany; January 18–20, 2016
Workshop organizers: Uli Sauerland and Petra Schumacher
Pre-proceedings eds. Fabienne Salfner and Uli Sauerland
Funded by XPRAG.de (@XPragDe) & ZAS


Extracto del apartado 2 de la publicación en PDF

«If one assumes that pragmatic enrichments are dependent on forming common ground with a speaker, it follows that even a basic pragmatic inference should be affected by a small feature of the speaker-addressee interaction (as, say, whether or not a listener considers himself allied with an anonymous speaker). On the other hand, if the coded meaning of the utterance were sufficient to communicate, it should not matter who gives an instruction.

»Tiffany Morisseau and I recently completed a set of studies in which participants needed to follow some basic instructions about what to click on a screen (e.g. click on the flower) as they search among four objects. The critical case was one where the request, such as click on the wet dog potentially prompted a contrastive inference (a search for a non-wet dog). Now, some people consider it noncontroversial (Sedivy, 2003 [ ‘Pragmatic versus form-based accounts of referential contrast: Evidence for effects of informativity expectations’, J. of Psycholinguistic research]) to assume that the instruction encourages participants to determine whether there is another dog, but based on developmental evidence I am not entirely sure the contrastive inference arises consistently even among adults (Kronmuller et al., 2014 [Show me the pragmatic contribution: A developmental investigation of referential communication. Journal of Child Language]).

»In half of the critical conditions, a dry dog was visible among the remaining three possibilities. In the other half, the dry dog was present but less visible (behind a grayish, filtering square) so that it called for a more invested search. The question we asked concerned the role of the messenger, the speaker. While instructions from two speakers were identical and always felicitous, in half the conditions the search request came from the speaker’s (political) ingroup and half came from the speaker’s outgroup.

»With the expectation that a contrast item is going to be sought out, at least by some participants, the question is to what degree. So, one question going in was, is the contrast object consistently and automatically sought out (as measured by looks at the hidden object)? Another question was, does group membership affect the search for the contrast object? Results show that the hidden item was more likely to be tracked when it was expected to contain a contrast object as opposed to nothing relevant and that this effect was enhanced in the Outgroup condition. Thus, the social affiliation between a speaker and a listener influences the extent to which pragmatic information is readily accepted.»