16.1518, Review: Pragmatics/Psycholing: Noveck & Sperber (2004)

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Subject: 16.1518, Review: Pragmatics/Psycholing: Noveck & Sperber (2004)

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1)
Date: 11-May-2005
From: Rick Nouwen < R.Nouwen at lingua.uni-frankfurt.de >
Subject: Experimental Pragmatics 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 12:35:37
From: Rick Nouwen < R.Nouwen at lingua.uni-frankfurt.de >
Subject: Experimental Pragmatics 
 

EDITORS: Noveck, Ira A; Sperber, Dan
TITLE: Experimental Pragmatics
PUBLISHER: Palgrave Macmillan
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-272.html


Rick Nouwen, Graduiertenkolleg "Satzarten", Johann Wolfgang Goethe-
Universität Frankfurt am Main

SUMMARY

This book is a collection of papers on studies in the new field 
of "experimental pragmatics," which combines pragmatics with experimental 
psychology. Pragmatics, here, is to be understood in a narrow sense, 
namely as the study of how the interaction of linguistic properties and 
context influences the interpretation of an utterance. This type of 
pragmatic theory has traditionally been developed by linguists and 
philosophers of language who have used their own intuitions as the basis 
for their argumentation. Only recently has it been acknowledged that 
experimental methods could play an important role in creating stronger 
theories of "linguistic pragmatics." At the same time, a growing 
recognition has emerged that experimental psychology will benefit from 
studying pragmatics as well, since it has become clear that pragmatic 
processes play an important role in quite a lot of cognitive tasks. The 
editors of this collection stress, therefore, that the interaction between 
the different kinds of methodology used in experimental psychology and 
pragmatic theory will no doubt form empirically and theoretically stronger 
theories of both pragmatic phenomena and the underlying cognitive 
processes. 

The book is divided into three parts. The first contains five chapters 
representing pioneering approaches to experimental pragmatics. These 
chapters describe longer periods of research on a specific topic and 
discuss how experimental psychology and linguistic pragmatics have 
interacted. In the second part, five papers introduce current topics in 
experimental approaches to pragmatic phenomena. The third and final part 
is completely devoted to the topic of scalar implicatures.

Part I: Pioneering approaches.

In the first chapter of this part, Herbert Clark and Adrian Bangerter 
review how the theory of (definite) reference evolved over the years. In 
particular, they show that this theoretical development was fuelled by 
three distinct methods: (i) armchair theorising (intuitions), (ii) 
experimental research and (iii) field observations. The authors discuss 
how reference was first thought of as an uncooperative process (the 
picking of a referent out of a set of alternatives) and how a series of 
theoretical and experimental work caused several adjustments to how we 
think about reference. After the philosophical work of Grice and 
theoretical studies into the phenomenon of bridging reference, referring 
is analysed a cooperative act. Subsequently, experimental research makes 
clear that reference involves an additional coordination process. In 
particular, it is shown that the interaction between the speaker and 
hearer is crucial for the act of referring to proceed smoothly.  

In the next chapter, Raymond Gibbs uses four case studies from his own 
empirical work to illustrate how experimental research methods may be put 
to work to help settle theoretical debates in linguistic pragmatics. The 
studies discuss a variety of phenomena, including direct and indirect 
speech acts and the attributive/referential distinction for definite 
descriptions. Gibbs argues that studies like his illustrate the merits of 
a field like experimental pragmatics. The impact of experimental studies 
of linguistic pragmatic phenomena are in his view not to be 
underestimated. They offer a falsification framework for pragmatics, while 
at the same time they may resolve some of the scepticism that exists among 
psycholinguists and scholars in theoretical pragmatics with respect to the 
merits and the very possibility of experimental pragmatics. 

In the third pioneering study, Sam Glucksberg argues against processing 
models that assume that non-literal meaning only emerges in a secondary 
processing stage. In such models, literal meaning is processed 
effortlessly, while non-literal (or 'speaker's') meaning only emerges 
after the defective literal meaning leads to additional inferences. 
Glucksberg discusses several experiments on metaphor comprehension and 
concept combination which show that pragmatic processes are automatic. 

The next chapter, written by Guy Politzer, is concerned with the pragmatic 
analysis of reasoning tasks. In evaluating tasks, Politzer distinguishes a 
macro-analysis from a micro-analysis, which both are related to pragmatic 
theory. In the macro-analysis, the experiment itself (that is, the 
interaction between experimenter and subject) is essentially seen as a 
conversational setting and therefore subject to all sorts of assumptions 
and inferences which need to be reviewed. The micro-analysis of 
experimental tasks applies to the premisses, consequences, questions etc. 
that make up the task: it investigates what the actual propositions are 
the participant uses. Such an analysis is therefore essential to 
guaranteeing the validity of a task. Politzer illustrates his pragmatic 
analysis by describing several experimental studies, showing that 
experimental studies of reasoning cannot do without linguistic-
pragmatics.  

The final chapter of the first part of the book deals with quantifiers. It 
sums up 15 years of research into the processing properties of natural 
language quantifiers by the authors, Anthony Sanford and Linda Moxey. The 
goal of their research programme is to construct a psychological model of 
quantifier comprehension and to compare it with the predominantly formal 
linguistic and logical standard analyses of quantification. They 
concentrate on two functions of quantifiers their experimental studies 
have revealed: the so-called focus of a quantifier (the set a quantifier 
brings to mind) and the possibility for a quantifier to deny a contextual 
supposition. An important part of the studies described in this chapter 
deal with discrepancies between the experimentally attested data and 
predictions made by analytical properties of quantifiers. For instance, 
initial data suggested that the focus of a quantifiers is dependent on 
whether or not it has the logical property of being upward entailing. On 
closer investigation, it turned out, however, that it is rather  the 
psychologically distinct notion of 'denial' that is related to quantifier 
focus. Sanford and Moxey show that the factors that play a role in 
quantifier processing are non-analytical and are represented in continua. 
Such results, the authors argue, illustrate the need for studying language 
comprehension from the point of view of communication. 

Part II: Current Issues in Experimental Pragmatics

In first chapter of this part of the book, Jean-Baptiste Van der Genst and 
Dan Sperber discuss several experiments designed to test and confirm some 
explicit central consequences of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 
1995). In particular, they focus on the two principles of relevance  
theory: (i) that human cognition typically involves the maximisation of 
relevance and (ii) that utterances involve a presumption of their own 
optimal relevance. The first, cognitive, principle is tested by a series 
of experiments on reasoning with comparison relations. It turns out that 
subjects are willing to draw only those conclusions that are potentially 
relevant. The second, communicative, principle is studied on the basis of 
a series of variations on Wason's Selection Task. It is shown that the 
performance on the task can be experimentally controlled by varying the 
context and as such the relevance of certain actions. Similar results are 
found for a production task.

The next chapter is written by Orna Peleg, Rechel Giora and Ofer Fein. 
These authors study context effects in linguistic processing and argue for 
the so-called "graded salience hypothesis." According to this hypothesis, 
during language processing, linguistic (i.e. lexical) meanings are ordered 
with respect to salience (on the basis of qualitative or quantitative 
familiarity.) The more salient a meaning is, the faster it will be 
accessed. A series of four experiments is presented that offers support 
for this hypothesis and yields interesting data on the interaction between 
lexical and contextual information.

Seanna Coulson's contribution to the book is the only one dealing with 
cognitive neuroscience and electrophysiological methods. Coulson gives a 
comprehensive and accessible overview of techniques in cognitive 
neuroscience, focusing in particular on so-called event-related brain 
potentials (ERPs). ERPs can be used to reveal systematic differences in 
brain responses to pairs of stimuli. They yield waveforms containing 
positive and negative peaks. The deflections of such a waveform are called 
components. Several specific ERP components have turned out to be 
functionally significant and have linguistic relevance. For instance, the 
amplitude of the so-called N400 component has been shown to vary inversely 
with the predictability of a certain word in a (preceding) context. 
Moreover, it has been shown that words in an ambiguous text show 
relatively greater N400 amplitudes than words in disambiguated text. This 
component is thus directly relevant to pragmatics. Since, moreover, ERPs 
offer a continuous direct measure of brain response, they are sensitive to 
different kinds of processing and consequently offer a more detailed 
measure than, for instance, reading times do. Coulson exploits this 
feature in a study of metaphor comprehension and shows that there is a 
continuum from literal to metaphorical interpretation rather than a 
dichotomy. Coulson concludes by suggesting some interesting future 
experiments which involve the study (and discovery) of pragmatic processes 
using ERPs. 

The next study in the book discusses children's understanding of speech 
acts, with special focus on the case of promises. The authors, Josie 
Bernicot and Virginie Laval, present two experiments. In the first, the so-
called preparatory condition is focused on. This condition says that 
something is a commissive act only if the listener prefers the speaker to 
perform the action in question. The experiment shows the relative late 
acquisition of this condition. A second experiment shows that textual and 
contextual aspects of processing start to interact around the age of 6. 
This experiment, which was performed in French, shows that when children 
are asked to process promises phrased using a future tense (instead of an 
explicit verb "promettre" (to promise)) in absence of a promise-specific 
context, they will only reconstruct the promise when the immediate (rather 
than the simple) future tense is used. In other words, the experiments 
show the close relation between textual and contextual factors in both 
language acquisition and language use. 

The final chapter in the second part of the book concerns "even-if" 
conditionals and is written by Simon Handley and Aidan Feeney. Central to 
the experiments presented in this chapter are conditionals like "Even if I 
read everything on the reading list, I will fail the exam." Since it is 
very surprising that someone fails an exam while having read everything on 
the reading list, subjects are not eager to conclude that the speaker will 
in fact fail. This provides evidence against an analysis of even-if 
conditionals as universally quantified statements, where "even if A, B" is 
interpreted as "in every possible case (including A), B is true". In such 
an analysis one would expect that the truth of the consequence follows 
readily from any even-if conditional. Effects like the ones found in 
Handley and Feeney's experiment are therefore unaccounted for. In general, 
the experiments indicate that the inferences drawn from conditional 
assertions display a rich and varied pattern that involves not only 
logical reasoning but moreover the subject's background knowledge and 
expectations. 

Part III: The Case of Scalar Implicatures

The final four chapters of the book all deal with scalar implicatures, a 
traditionally hot topic in pragmatics, but now hot in experimental 
pragmatics as well, as illustrated by this separate book-part addressing 
the implicature debate. 

Three of the chapters on implicatures deal with the debate between two 
competing theories of pragmatic inferences. According to the "default" 
theory (for instance, Levinson 2000, referred to as the prototypical 
version of such a theory in several chapters), implicatures are 
automatically associated with a term. That is, the use of an expression 
that is relatively weak on a scale automatically implicates  the denial of 
the stronger expressions on that scale. For instance, "some" is per 
default interpreted as "some but not all." Only when the inference is 
found to be incompatible with other information, can the implicature be 
retracted. The opposing theory (for instance Relevance Theory) views the 
weak interpretation as most salient to the term and assumes that 
implicatures involve processing effort. 

Anne Bezuidenhout and Robin Morris study what happens when subjects have 
to  process a (small) text containing a scalar term, where the utterances 
eventually do not support the implicature, but do support the weak 
interpretation of the term. In the "default" model, initial smooth 
processing is predicted with an eventually costly retracting of the 
default inference. In what they call the "underspecification model" 
(inspired by relevance theory), it is predicted that there will be no need 
for reanalysis, but that during processing the weak reading will simply be 
strengthened more and more. Bezuidenhout and Morris performed two eye-
tracking experiments to test these predictions. The results are clearly 
compatible with the underspecification model. However, as the authors 
argue, the results do not so clearly falsify the default model. 
Nevertheless, Bezuidenhout and Morris stress that eye-tracker data like 
these are extremely valuable for the theoretical debate. Eye-tracker 
results do not just tell us whether or not people are aware of 
implicatures, but moreover indicate when in the comprehension process such 
inferences are made. 

Also focusing on the debate between the "default" framework and models 
inspired by Relevance Theory is the chapter by Ira Noveck. He focuses on a 
specific developmental-pragmatic effect: children tend to give a weak 
logical interpretation to weak logical terms like "or", "some" or "might." 
For instance, children are much more likely to interpret "or" as inclusive 
than adults (who prefer the non-logical stronger exclusive 
interpretation). Both competing theories may offer an explanation for this 
effect. According to Relevance Theory, the logical meaning is minimal. The 
effect is then explained by assuming that the capacity for making 
pragmatic inferences is increased with age. The default model could 
explain the effect by assuming that pragmatic inferences only turn into 
defaults with age. Noveck argues that these explanations have a testable 
difference. Only according to the explanation  inspired by Relevance 
Theory may the complexity of a task influence the outcome. That is, a 
sufficiently effortless task should trigger non-logical interpretations 
even with children that normally show to only adopt the weak meaning. 
Unfortunately, developmental data is difficult to interpret. Some results 
supporting the Relevance Theoretical model, however, are borne out. Very 
easy tasks indeed show adult-like behaviour with young children. Moreover, 
harder experiments with adult subjects tend to yield more logical 
meanings. 

Anne Reboul's chapter also suggests experimental support for the non-
default model of pragmatic inferences. Reboul is interested in 
comparatives of the form "Better tea than no coffee." In her experiments, 
subjects are asked to interpret such utterances and then to decide whether 
the speaker prefers tea or coffee and what he or she was actually given. 
She argues that the default model predicts that subjects confronted with 
such a comparison end up with an interpretative dead-end, since they will 
interpret "tea" as "only tea", rendering the sentence into the 
nonsensical "Better only tea than only tea." In two experiments, she shows 
that this prediction is not borne out. 

The remaining chapter in the part on implicatures concerns a somewhat 
different debate on the defaultness of pragmatic inferences. A team of 
researchers consisting of Gennaro Chierchia, Maria Teresa Guasti, Andrea 
Gualmini, Luisa Meroni, Stephen Crain and Francesca Foppolo offers 
experimental results that apply to a theoretical complication introduced 
in Chierchia's non-experimental work. Chierchia  has argued against a 
Gricean theory of pragmatic inferences, where  implicatures are post-
propositional "global" inferences.An iImplicature in  fact turns out to be 
a rather local effect. For example, for a sentence "Mary is either reading 
a paper or seeing some students" the resulting implicated reading should 
be "Either Mary is reading a paper or she is seeing some students, but she 
is not seeing all students." The standard approach, however, seems to 
generate an unwanted inference, namely "it is not the case that Mary is 
either reading a paper or seeing every student." An additional problem for 
implicature computation follows from the observation that implicatures do 
not arise in downward entailing (DE) contexts. But since implicatures 
emerge locally,  how are they going to blocked once embedded in DE-
contexts? In Chierchia's  proposal, the so-called Semantic Core Model, 
the "plain" and the "scalar"  meaning of a sentence are both computed on 
the basis of a recursive  bottom-up process. These two meanings are 
eventually compared and the most  informative one is added to the context. 
The model explains readily  why implicatures surface locally. Since only 
the most informative  meaning "wins" and negation reverses informativity 
scales,  the model also accounts for the fact that in DE-contexts scalar 
implicatures are not expected. The experiments presented in this chapter 
are designed to find support for Chierchia's theoretical model and focus 
on how adults and children interpret disjunction in DE and non-DE 
contexts. In a first experiment, it is shown  that adults derive the 
(logical) inclusive reading for "or" rather than the  exclusive reading 
significantly more often in DE contexts than in non-DE contexts. In a 
second experiment, children turn out to accept the inclusive reading 
of  "or" much more often than adults do. In a third experiment, the 
predictions of the Semantic Core Model are tested directly, by asking 
subjects to perform a truth-value judgement task on (acted-out) utterances 
containing a disjunction embedded in either a DE or a non-DE context. 
Adults perform the task as the Semantic Core Model predicts: they compute 
the scalar implicature only in the non-DE context. Half the children are 
adult-like, while the other half computes the implicatures even in DE 
contexts. Using a final experiment, the authors intend to show that the 
children's behaviour cannot be accounted for in a Gricean model. By 
letting children compare two true utterances one of which is more 
informative (and therefore more appropriate) than the other, they test 
whether children know Grice's Maxim of Quantity. It turns out that 
children perform this task very well. Almost all children are capable of 
distinguishing the more appropriate true utterance from the less-
informative true one.

EVALUATION

"Experimental pragmatics" is an interesting and valuable contribution to 
both linguistic pragmatics and experimental psychology. It offers a clear 
outline of a new field and it convincingly shows why an experimental 
approach to pragmatics is attractive and indeed necessary.

I can recommend this book to researchers and students of  pragmatics, 
psycholinguistics and the psychology of reasoning.  The individual 
chapters are accessible even to readers who are less familiar with 
pragmatic theory or experimental methods. The studies in this book are 
generally of a high standard.

Clearly, however, the field of experimental pragmatics has not reached 
maturity yet. An "experimental pragmatics"-sceptic might claim that  
experimental research into pragmatic phenomena has little theoretical 
value  since the theories in linguistic pragmatics are not explicit enough 
to  be tested. Such criticism is still very much applicable (even if some 
contributing  authors in this volume suggest otherwise). I fear that the 
theoretical  impact of some of the studies is somewhat limited. In quite a 
few  chapters of this book, it is not entirely clear why a certain theory 
makes the predictions the authors claim it does. In my view, this is 
because there is still a large gap between  the models that are being 
tested and the linguistic pragmatic theories  these models are based on. 
In particular, "standard" theories of pragmatics often fail to make 
explicit processing predictions. This is illustrated by the fact that in 
several chapters in this book, researchers do not test an existing theory, 
but rather their own processing model that is loosely based on one. 
Consequently, the falsification of such a model does not necessarily lead 
to the falsification of the theory. These critical notes do not mean, 
however, that the studies in this book are unconvincing.  Overall, the 
findings are extremely valuable, even if their direct  theoretical 
consequences are somewhat limited. The  ultimate merit of the field of 
experimental pragmatics (and indirectly of  this book) is exactly that by 
experimentation the theories of  pragmatics will gradually lose their 
psychological vagueness. The large range of  impressive experimental 
results that is presented in this book will force theorists to incorporate 
explicit experimentally attested processing parameters in their theories. 

"Experimental Pragmatics" makes it clear that enormous progress is being 
made in this young collaboration between two fields and that the 
experimental results will eventually lead to new models of language use. 
By doing so, this collection is a big success.

REFERENCES

Levinson, S.C. (2000). Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized 
Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Sperber, D., and Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition 
(2nd edn). Oxford: Blackwell. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Rick Nouwen is a postdoctoral researcher at the 
Graduiertenkolleg "Satzarten," J.W. Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/Main in 
Germany.  His research has mainly focused on the formal semantics and 
pragmatics  of plural and quantified anaphora. His current work involves 
the  meaning and use of quantifiers, with special attention to cognitive  
and logical aspects of reference to quantity.





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