31.267, Review: Computational Linguistics; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics: Cummins, Katsos (2018)

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Subject: 31.267, Review: Computational Linguistics; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics: Cummins, Katsos (2018)

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Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2020 15:54:15
From: Nicolas Ruytenbeek [nicolasruytenbeek at gmail.com]
Subject: The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-2058.html

EDITOR: Chris  Cummins
EDITOR: Napoleon  Katsos
TITLE: The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Nicolas Ruytenbeek, Ghent University

SUMMARY

In Chapter 1, “Introduction”, Chris Cummins and Napoleon Katsos, the book
editors, present the aims underlying this volume. These are a wish to reflect
a change in the field of semantics and pragmatics, where researchers gradually
moved away from armchair intuitions to empirical data collected using more
reliable and controlled methods. They also want this volume to reflect a
variety of research topics, experimental methods, and available findings in
this recent and growing field. Finally, they hope these contributions will
help identify under-researched questions and stimulate the use of contemporary
methodological tools. Concerning the organization of the volume, it is not,
strictly speaking, divided into thematic sections, but the editors have
grouped the chapters according to their content.

Chapters 2 to 4 share a common thread, as they all relate to implicatures.

In Chapter 2, “Language comprehension, inference, and alternatives”, Dimitrios
Skordos and David Barner provide an overview of theoretical and empirical work
concerning inference-making and disambiguation between alternative
interpretations. Focusing on the processing of scalar terms and quantifiers,
they show that children’s comprehension of these types of linguistic
expressions in context differs from that of adults, insofar as children often
experience difficulty when trying to relate an utterance to a plausible
question under discussion (QUD).

Chapter 3, “Constraint-based pragmatic processing”, addresses the major
developments in constraint-based accounts of natural language understanding.
Judith Degen and Michael K. Tanenhaus apply this approach to scalar
implicatures, and structure their contribution by examining QUD, prior beliefs
and world knowledge, informativeness with respect to alternative utterances,
information about the speaker, and common ground. They highlight the
usefulness of these approaches to study perspective-taking in decision-making
situations, and make suggestions for further research on the relationship
between processing speed and likelihood of interpretations.

In Chapter 4, “Scalar implicatures”, Richard Breheny contributes a literature
study on the interpretation of scalar terms (e.g., some, most, all) from a
psychological and linguistic perspective. One major finding is that the
“literal first” model is untenable, and a large variety of factors, including
aspects of experimental design, may influence the rate of derivation of scalar
implicatures. One possible way to further investigate scalars is to study them
together with QUDs and the search for relevance behind our utterances.

Chapters 5 to 7 concern topics that are not otherwise related to other
contributions in the volume.

Chapter 5, “Event (de)composition”, presents how different elements that
structure an event are involved in utterance processing. For instance, the
sentence “John hardened the steel” means that John caused the steel to become
hard, where CAUSE and BECOME are event predicates. Sherry Yong Chen and E.
Mathew Husband review experimental evidence ranging from reading tasks to
decision-making paradigms. They provide a complete picture of how event
components are integrated into a coherent representation, revealing cognitive
complexity differences between result (“The prices broke the market”) and
manner (“The explorer climbed the mountain”) meanings.

In Chapter 6, “Presupposition, projection, and accommodation”, Florian
Schwartz discusses current theoretical issues and recent experimental findings
pertaining to different types of presupposition triggers, such as soft vs.
hard triggers corresponding to easy vs. difficult presupposition
cancellability. His literature review emphasizes the variety of behaviors
corresponding to these different trigger types. However, to date, no theory is
able to account for this disparity, and more research is needed, in particular
when it comes to embedded presupposition triggers.

Cross-linguistic differences and similarities in the linguistic encoding of
information about space is addressed in Chapter 7, “Spatial terms”. Myrto
Grigoroglou and Anna Papafragou are also interested in the underlying
cognitive representations of spatial terms, which are very similar across
languages. They also point out that using spatial terms is beneficial to the
performance of cognitively demanding tasks. The authors take as case studies
spatial terms concerning location (on/under), motion (into/from), and frames
of reference.

In Chapters 8 to 15, the reader will find discussions of quantifiers and
similar operators.

In Chapter 8, “Counterfactuals”, Heather Ferguson examines how information
about fictitious and alternative worlds is represented and processed in real
time. She reviews experimental studies using psychophysiological methods,
showing that factual and counterfactual contexts can be accessed in parallel.
An important question that deserves more research concerns the influence of
social context on the use and interpretation of counterfactual information, as
well as the (lack of) flexibility that individuals with autism spectrum
disorder (ASD) experience when dealing with counterfactual utterances.

Chapter 9, “Distributivity”, focuses on interpretative ambiguities associated
with distributive sentences. For instance, “The two men ate a pizza” has a
collective reading (they ate together only one pizza) and a distributive
reading (each of them ate one pizza). Kristen Syrett reviews experimental data
from children and adult participants, consisting in acceptability judgment
tasks complemented by online studies. The author also emphasizes the
importance of extending experimental work on distributive sentences to
languages other than English.

In Chapter 10, “Genericity”, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigaga deal with sentences
about classes, such as “A cat lands on its feet”. They present the formal
semantic, psychological, and philosophical accounts of genericity. Different
experimental approaches to the phenomenon of genericity are reviewed. As these
are largely based on offline judgments, the authors make recommendations for
future experiments involving online methods of data collection, such as
brain-imaging techniques.

Chapter 11 concerns “Modified numerals” such as “at least/most + numeral +
noun”. Rick Nouwen, Stavroula Alexandropoulou and Yaron McNabb take into
consideration experimental evidence showing that modified numerals give rise
to pragmatic inferences. The authors criticize current approaches to pragmatic
inference in general, that only distinguish between defeasible and mandatory
inferences. They insist that more attention should be paid to the variability
in the likelihood of pragmatic inferences.

In Chapter 12, “Negation”, Ye Tian and Richard Breheny provide an overview of
experimental evidence bearing on the processing of linguistic negation. One
possible generalization is that processing differences between negative
utterances and their affirmative counterparts become smaller as more
contextual information is available. Another finding concerns the larger
amount of background information against which negative utterances are
interpreted. From a theoretical perspective, dynamic accounts of negation
processing are confirmed.

Chapter 13, “Plurality”, addresses the puzzle triggered by sentences including
“more than one X” (e.g., “More than one donkey arrived” vs. “No more than one
donkey arrived”), the negation of which is not identical to the negation of
the plural equivalent of “more than one” (Donkeys arrived vs. No donkeys
arrived). Lyn Tieu and Jacopo Romoli demonstrate that the strong reading of
“more than one” (strictly more than one, not equal to one) is best thought of
as an implicature.

Chapter 14, “Quantification”, deals with differences in the scope of
quantifiers, as in the sentence “Each girl kissed a boy”, which can be
understood as meaning that one boy was kissed by each of the girls or as
meaning that each girl kissed a boy (not necessarily the same boy). After
reviewing available experimental findings on the interpretation of quantifiers
such as “each”, “every”, “all” and the definite article “the”, Adrian
Brasoveanu and Jakub Dotlačil make suggestions for integrating these findings
into a unified theory of scope.

In Chapter 15, “Quantifier spreading”, Patricia J. Brooks and Olga Parshina
address comprehension mistakes associated with sentences of the type “Every
farmer is feeding a donkey”. Children often report this sentence as being
incorrect if there is one donkey left that is not being taken care of. The
experimental evidence covered in this chapter indicates that this
mistake—known as quantifier spreading—does not result from the
misinterpretation of a quantifier. Processing experiments involving
eye-tracking also show that cognitive effort increases during spreading
errors.

Chapters 16 to 22 are devoted to lexical ambiguities.

In Chapter 16, “Adjective meanings and scales”, Stephanie Solt provides an
overview of how gradable adjectives have been experimentally investigated.
This wide range of evidence, which enables the objectification of native
speakers’ intuitions, concerns, in particular, the type of scale associated
with gradable adjectives. She also discusses evidence bearing on adjectival
subjectivity and faultless disagreement, and closes this chapter with
methodological issues related to stimuli creation, the choice of tasks, and
the wording of questions.

Chapter 17, “Ironic utterances”, summarizes empirical findings having to do
with the processing of irony. Nicola Spotorno and Ira Noveck assume a general
Gricean background against which they assess the results of recent
neuro-imaging and psychophysiological studies, including Spotorno’s own PhD
research. This review highlights the key role of theory of mind in irony
comprehension. Another general conclusion is that one should be careful when
manipulating attitude ascriptions in experimental designs.

In Chapter 18, “Metaphor”, Nausicaa Pouscoulous and Giulio Dulcinati discuss
experimental research concerning metaphors, i.e., mappings from one cognitive
domain to another. Interested in the cognitive processes underlying metaphor
understanding, their contribution focuses on the relationship between the
literal and figurative meaning of metaphorical utterances, on the theoretical
debate between defenders of the “property matching” view vs. the “automatic
understanding” view, and on differences in the acquisition of different types
of metaphors. In addition, the authors propose new avenues of research for
studies on metaphors.

Chapter 19, “Metonymy”, is devoted to metonymy as a trope or a cognitive
operation consisting in referring to an entity by means of another, associated
entity. Petra B. Schumacher discusses experimental data enabling a comparison
between the processing of metonymies and that of expressions with multiple
meanings. She then contrasts the processing of multiple meanings vs. that of
meaning extensions, which exhibits considerable variability. Findings from
studies in language acquisition and language disorders are also considered.

In Chapter 20, “Vagueness”, Sam Alxatib and Uli Sauerland discuss the
contribution of experimental work to research on linguistic vagueness.
Differentiating current theories of vagueness in terms of scope (global/local)
and valency (bivalent, trivalent, multivalent), the authors focus on
borderline cases where a gradable adjective is predicated of an object or
person (e.g., “John is (not) tall”) and on rounding in numbers. Their overview
reflects a current increase in the reliability of speakers’ judgments caused
by more controlled methods for data collection.

In Chapter 21, “Verbal uncertainty”, Marie Juanchich, Miroslav Sirota and
Jean-François Bonnefon address the various methods used by experimental
psychologists to study human communication about uncertainty. They examine how
verbal probabilities expressed by, for instance, “a tiny/small chance”,
“probably”, “likely”, etc. are mapped onto numerical probabilities. They also
pay attention to the spontaneous use of probability expressions in daily
communication.

Chapter 22, “Word senses”, proposes an answer to the question of why words
have distinct senses. Hugh Rabagliati and Mahesh Srinivasan discuss the three
major perspectives on the meaning of words: conceptual biases and
culture-specific conventions rooted in cognitive development, how word senses
are represented in our mental lexicon, and the learning mechanisms involved in
word processing. This chapter shows that cognitive flexibility is a key factor
in dealing with multiple senses.

Chapters 23 to 29 focus on utterance disambiguation in discourse.

Kristen Syrett’s Chapter 23, “Antecedent-contained deletion”, is about a
particular case of verbal ellipsis (VE), as in “Lady Sybil fell in love, and
Lady Mary did, too”. This is called antecedent-contained deletion (ACD), as
illustrated in “Daisy eventually knew how to prepare every dish that Mrs.
Patmore did”. Assuming a generative syntactic framework, she reviews
experimental studies on movements involved in ACD, such as quantifier raising,
in children and adults.

Chapter 24 “Exhaustivity in it-clefts”, deals with sentences of the type “It
was John who left during the meeting”, which triggers an exhaustivity
inference according to which nobody other than John left during the meeting.
In this chapter, Edgar Onea proposes a critical discussion of experimental
findings bearing on the status of exhaustivity inferences: Are they
presuppositions? Implicatures? The evidence reviewed supports an analysis of
these inferences in terms of implicatures. The author makes a proposal for
deriving them as anaphors related to a QUD.

Chapter 25, “Focus”, considers different realizations of focus: prosody,
clefts, and focus particles such as “only”. Christina S. Kim concentrates on
issues concerning the characterization and operationalization of focus in
available experimental studies, where different understandings of focus exist.
The experimental studies brought to the fore by the author cover the cognitive
processing of focus realizations measured by eye movements, focus and
ambiguity resolution, focus as a cue to discourse structure, and conflicting
cues to focus.

In Chapter 26, “Negative polarity items” (NPIs), Ming Xiang addresses these
lexical items that are only licensed by a negation, such as anybody in “John
didn’t talk to anybody”. Experimental evidence bearing on the acquisition of
NPIs is discussed, showing that the variety of NPIs differ in terms of
difficulty of acquisition. Additional research is welcome, in particular
relative to the interplay between NPIs and focus marking expressions, and
downward entailing inferences.

In Chapter 27, “Pronouns”, Hannah Rohde stresses that pronouns not only
structure discourse, but they impose pragmatic constraints on their use and
interpretation. She reviews experimental findings relevant to the reasoning
underlying the identification of pronoun referents. To reconcile
coherence-based and form-based approaches of the anaphoric use of pronouns,
she presents a Bayesian approach. This account takes into consideration
interpreters’ prior beliefs about the mention of a referent and the likelihood
that this referent will be mentioned with a pronoun.

In Chapter 28, “Reference and informativeness”, Catherine Davies and Jennifer
E. Arnold are interested in how speakers use linguistic expressions with a
referring purpose. They focus on modified vs. unmodified referential
expressions and on pronominalized vs. explicit descriptions. A Gricean
approach centered on the maxim of Quantity and a discursive approach are
considered. Available experimental findings concerning the use and processing
of referential expressions is reviewed according to common ground, gestures,
referential pacts, speaker’s goals, and constraints from referents.

Chapter 29, “Prosody and meaning”, concerns the contribution of prosodic
information on meaning, in particular information-structuring focus. Judith
Tonhauser considers experimental data from different languages showing a high
variability in the prosodic realization of focus across speakers and
utterances. The role of prosody in the likelihood of derivation of scalar
implicatures is also addressed.

The remaining three chapters share an interest in the pragmatics of social
interaction.

In Chapter 30, “Politeness”, Thomas Holtgraves considers experimental research
on politeness triggered Brown & Levinson’s (1987) model, and bearing on the
complex interaction between social status, distance, and perceived
(im)politeness. In particular, he discusses evidence concerning the role of
face-threat in the derivation of scalar implicatures and the cognitive
mechanisms involved in the processing of politeness. He also proposes to
investigate several other contextual and inter-individual variables.

Chapter 31, “Theory of mind”, is devoted to how humans reason about others’
beliefs and desires. Paula Rubio-Fernández provides an overview of empirical
data from children aged 2-4, indicating that their ability to attribute
beliefs actually precedes the age at which they pass traditional false beliefs
tests. Being aware of someone else’s mental states is different from being
able to predict or explain that person’s behavior. She highlights the
importance of theory of mind studies for pragmatic research in general.

In the final chapter, “Turn-taking”, Jan P. De Ruiter addresses the rules that
underlie daily communication from a conversational analytic (CA) perspective.
He starts his contribution with an explanation about the debated status of
these rules. He then explores the processing of these rules in terms of
lexico-syntactic information that enables anticipating the next turn,
stressing the relevance of combining CA, corpus analysis, offline and online
experimental methods.

EVALUATION

In offering reviews concerning a variety of topics at the semantics-pragmatics
interface, this book makes both a theoretical and empirical contribution. It
achieves one of its main goals, providing an up-to-date overview of
experimental data collected using different methodologies, ranging from native
speakers’ introspective judgments (offline) to measures of moment-by-moment
cognitive processing of utterances (online). These aims are clearly expressed
by the editors in their introductory chapter, where they also provide some
justification for the central attention given to Gricean pragmatics and scalar
implicatures.

The editors deliberately present the individual chapters one after the other,
without dividing the volume in separate parts based on content. In fact, this
decision enables the reader to move back and forth through the volume. It also
makes it possible to consider several chapters as a whole, such as the three
contributions on figurative language (Chapters 17, 18, and 19 on irony,
metaphor, and metonymy, respectively), or to have a more general appraisal of
Chapters 16 to 29 (about a half of the total number of chapters) that have in
common an interest in pragmatic ambiguities.

The content of this handbook both is diversified enough to cover current
experimental research in semantics and pragmatics, and well delineated, as
other subfields of linguistics only receive a peripheral status in the
chapters. It is also really up to the minute because the authors of individual
chapters focus on the most recent theoretical approaches on the market and
they reflect the growing number of studies using cutting edge experimental
methods, such as brain imaging techniques and psychophysiological tools to
provide converging evidence about the processing of utterances in context.
Despite the title suggesting that the volume will have little to say about
theoretical considerations, there is a good balance between the space devoted
to theories and that devoted to empirical studies.

Even though the editors intended this book to gather chapters that were
representative of different research questions, several topics remains absent.
For instance, experimental research on speech acts in general, and indirect
speech acts in particular, are hardly touched upon. This is surprising,
insofar as indirectness has been, since the emergence of the field of
experimental pragmatics with Clark’s (1979) and Gibbs’ (1979) ground-breaking
empirical contributions, the bread and butter of research at the
semantics-pragmatics interface. Instead of indirect speech acts, conventional
and conversational implicatures, which should not be confused with the former,
are discussed in some detail throughout the chapters. In addition, unlike
assertive speech acts, directive speech acts are not addressed in the volume.
Finally, despite its very interesting critical discussion of experimental
studies that tested Brown & Levinson’s model, Holtgraves’ chapter pays little
attention to empirical investigation of perceived impoliteness, in particular
from an intercultural and cross-cultural perspective. This shortcoming is
complemented by individual chapters from the Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic
(Im)politeness (Culpeper et al. 2017), but cultural aspects of pragmatic
research are missing from the present handbook. Of course, as the editors
themselves acknowledge, taken together the chapters do not exhaust the
diversity of research topics in experimental semantics and pragmatics, but
they provide a strong incentive for extending the sort of work discussed here
and applying online methods for data collection to other, less well described
questions.

A possible concern that has to do with content is the absence of a discussion
of methodological issues arising from the variety of measures of “processing
cost” of “processing effort”, in the vein of Ruytenbeek (2017). This is
unfortunate, as the notion of “cognitive processing” itself is central to many
chapters. Questions such as which measure is appropriate to which research
question, and how these measures should be interpreted deserve additional
examination.

The view the editors advocate gives scalar implicatures considerable
attention, as they have been, and still are, an interesting case study at the
semantics-pragmatics interface. In their chapter, Degen and Tanenhaus rightly
call them “the drosophilia of experimental pragmatics”. By contrast, the
literal or “direct” vs. nonliteral or “indirect” distinction does not
constitute a common thread of the book. This dismissal of the
literal/nonliteral and direct/indirect distinctions by the editors in their
introductory chapter, and the fact that it is not endorsed in the individual
chapters, may constitute a shortcoming of the present book. Recent monographs,
such as Kissine’s (2013), and edited volumes, such as Depraetere & Salkie’s
(2017), illustrate the relevance of these distinctions both at the theoretical
and empirical levels.

To conclude, I have no doubt that this original much needed volume will appeal
not only to scholars who are relatively new to the new field of experimental
semantics and pragmatics, but also to young researchers willing to pursue new
research, and to more experienced scholars interested in interdisciplinary and
empirical linguistics.

REFERENCES

Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in
Language Usage. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Clark, Herbert H. 1979. “Responding to Indirect Speech Acts.” Cognitive
Psychology 11:430–77.

Culpeper, Jonathan, Michael Haugh & Dániel Kádár (Eds.). 2017. The Palgrave
Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Depraetere, Ilse & Raphael Salkie (Eds.). 2017. Semantics and Pragmatics:
Drawing a Line. Amsterdam: Springer.

Gibbs, Raymond W. 1979. “Contextual effects in understanding indirect
requests.” Discourse Processes 2: 1-10.

Kissine, Mikhail. 2013. From Utterances to Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Ruytenbeek, Nicolas. 2017. “The comprehension of indirect requests: Previous
work and future directions”. In Depraetere, Ilse & Raphael Salkie (Eds.),
Semantics and pragmatics: Drawing a line. Amsterdam: Springer, 293-322.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I am a Postdoctoral researcher in Linguistics at the Department for
Translation, Interpreting and Communication at Ghent University, and a member
of the research group MULTIPLES. My main research interests are experimental
approaches to politeness, speech act comprehension and production and, more
generally, issues bearing on the semantics/pragmatics interface.





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