Experimental Pragmatics
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Experimental Pragmatics Ira Noveck Laboratoire sur le Langage, le Cerveau et la Cognition (L2C2) & Centre de Recherche Français à Jérusalem (CRFJ), Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) & Nicola Spotorno Frontotemporal Degeneration Center, University of Pennsylvania Introduction Imagine sitting at a bar where someone woefully says, “Some jobs are jails.” This can be readily understood to implicate that some jobs are confining (or dispiriting, demoralizing etc.) and, if one wants to be even more precise, it could be taken to mean some but not all jobs are confining and so on. Both of these propositions go beyond what was literally said and -‐-‐ remarkably -‐-‐ arriving at these interpretations appears relatively routine. However, as is the case for many everyday experiences, it is a challenge to understand how it works. This explains, at least partly why there is a field of study, linguistic-‐pragmatics, devoted to investigating how such intended interpretations come about. Experimental Pragmatics can be viewed as a subdiscipline devoted to testing and advancing pragmatic accounts through psychological experiments. As has been described elsewhere (Sperber & Noveck, 2004; Noveck & Sperber, 2007), the approaches that inspire or are tested by Experimental Pragmatics accept as foundational two ideas that were defended by the philosopher Paul Grice. One is that interlocutors share the goal of having the speaker’s meaning—as opposed to the sentence meaning—recognised by the hearer and that they use utterances to that end. The second foundational idea is that, in inferring the speaker’s meaning on the basis of the decoding of her utterance on the one hand and of contextual information on the other, the hearer is guided by the expectation that the utterance should meet some standards. The
standards Grice envisaged were based on the idea that a conversation is a cooperative activity and that interlocutors are guided by expectations of informativeness, truthfulness, relevance, and so on. Over the course of the chapter, it will become clear how these Gricean ideas and distinctions infuse this literature. One generally accepted distinction is between what is said in a sentence and what the speaker means by saying it. The gulf between the two can be made more explicit by distinguishing between linguistic decoding and pragmatic inferencing. As Robyn Carston (2002) put it in describing the underdeterminacy thesis there is a great distance between the linguistic semantics of the utterance and the speaker’s meaning: What is meant by this (the underdeterminacy thesis) is that the linguistic semantics of the utterance, that is, the meaning encoded in the linguistic expressions used, the relatively stable meanings in a linguistic system, meanings which are widely shared across a community of users of the system, underdetermines the proposition expressed (what is said). The hearer has to undertake processes of pragmatic inference in order to work out not only what the hearer is implicating but also what proposition she is directly expressing. As will become clear, this way of describing the semantic-‐pragmatic divide is central to all of the topics in Experimental Pragmatics. In the first part of this chapter, we will summarize research on scalar inferences, which concerns the way relatively weak expressions such as some (which is compatible with all but can be interpreted as some but not all) are interpreted. This will be divided into two parts, corresponding to two phases in scalar inference research. The first showed that participants’ responses can be used to experimentally distinguish between semantic and pragmatic readings of weak scalar utterances (such as the one in 1a below). The second, more current, line of research is devoted to determining how pragmatic inferences are folded into speaker meaning in real time. We will then turn to referring expressions (e.g. Point to the big star), which shares many, though not all, of the concerns of the
scalar literature. Finally, the last two sections address figurative language as it summarizes work on metaphor and irony. As will become clear, each of these areas is in a different stage of development and has a unique history. Scalar inferences – which is the drosophila of experimental pragmatic research – is arguably the most developed area in terms of integrating current theoretical concerns with experimentation. Other topics, such as reference and metaphor, have been the focus of research in the psycholinguistic literature for some time, but their link to linguistic-‐pragmatic theory-‐making has been more tenuous and partly because experimental work on these topics predated the Gricean turn (see Noveck and Reboul 2008). Irony represents yet another unique case because from early on innovative pragmatic theoretical discussions gave rise to original experimental work about a role for attitude-‐ascription, but many of the experiments that followed gave way to research that focused on issues concerning literal meaning. This has resulted in a disconnect between the (early) theoretical discussions on irony and the extant experimental psychological literature. Before ending, we will complete our panorama with brief discussions of other related areas. Scalars 2.1 Background Imagine you organized a night out at a restaurant for yourself and friends when the waiter asks whether your guests enjoyed the meal. Now, imagine that you respond by saying (1a): (1a) Some of the guests enjoyed the meal. While the semantic meaning of (1a) is compatible with everyone having enjoyed the meal, your choice of words readily conveys information of the sort found in (1b): (1b) Not all of the guests enjoyed the meal. It is this sort of inference, which goes beyond what was explicitly said, that has been the focus of much work in experimental pragmatics.
As one can see, there is a distinction to be made between the linguistically encoded meaning and the speaker’s meaning. That is, one can determine a sentence meaning from an utterance by decoding that sentence, i.e. discovering the semantic properties that the grammar pairs to its acoustic form. Retrieving the speaker’s meaning involves attributing to the speaker an intention. More technically, the speaker’s intention is to produce a cognitive effect in her audience and to cause that audience to recognize that very intention. Although linguistic communication is partly code-‐based, it cannot be reduced to a mere encoding-‐decoding process. It involves the attribution of mental states to the speaker. According to Grice’s original account (1975), a listener decodes the literal meaning of an utterance (such as 1a) as a step in a process that ultimately arrives at the speaker’s intended meaning. Given that interlocutors are guided by expectations of informativeness, truthfulness, relevance, and so on, a violation of an expectation would compel a listener to look for alternative interpretations that lead to the speaker’s intended meaning. In the example above, such an expectation is expressed through the Maxim of Quantity by which speakers should: i) make their contribution as informative as is required, and ii) not make their contribution more informative than is required. When the literal meaning of an utterance does not satisfy these expectations (e.g., when an utterance is either overinformative or underinformative), hearers are entitled to assume that the speaker intended something more by way of an implicature. Thus, when a speaker says (1a), it could appear underinformative (since a speaker could have said All of the guests enjoyed the meal). This sort of explanation remains dominant in one form or another today (e;g., see Geurts, 2010). The earliest studies to explore the above distinction with these sorts of materials were developmental (meaning, children figured prominently in the study). Noveck (2001) showed that 7-‐to-‐10-‐year-‐olds do not make scalar inferences in reasoning tasks associated with some and might to the same degree as adults. In one of Noveck’s (2001) experiments, most children accepted sentences such as “Some giraffes have long necks” while adults tended to reject them as false (on the grounds that all giraffes have long necks). This effect has proven to be robust (with a wide variety materials across dozens of languages)
through multiple studies that specifically aimed to investigate it (e.g., Pouscolous et al., 2007; Guasti et al., 2005). The paper also offered a theoretical framework for appreciating classic developmental studies that (often inadvertently) investigated equally underinformative cases, including three where or was used to describe scenarios where and would have been more appropriate (Paris, 1973, Sternberg, 1984; Braine and Rumain, 1981). For example, Paris (1973) showed a picture of a boy with a bicycle and monkey in a tree; 8-‐year-‐olds were more likely than older children and adults to accept as true statements such as “There is a boy with a bicycle or a monkey in a tree.” While many researchers’ intuitions considered exclusive or more ordinary for cases like this, the developmental data showed that younger children were more willing to accept logical interpretations of or than adults. Collectively, these developmental studies represented the opening of the field of experimental pragmatics by seeking to, not only uncover novel robust phenomena but to, account for lingering (and what had been mysterious) data in the literature. More intense discussion arises once theorists describe how this process is carried out. Aside from approximations based on the outlines of Grice’s theory, there are several post-‐Gricean explanations for such conversational phenomena. Levinson (2000), for one, argues that there are inferential heuristics (or default inferences) that make utterances informative (e.g. the Q-‐heuristic What isn’t said, isn’t is applied to the utterance), transforming the linguistically encoded meaning in (1a) to (1b)). That is, inferences are automatically generated and can be cancelled if there are contextual reasons to do so. This has the advantage of making the inference a relatively light one-‐step process, which needs to access neither contextual premises nor the full Gricean rationale for their derivation. Another prominent account comes from Relevance Theory (RT), which describes how intended meanings are the result of the interplay between cognitive effects and effort in a particularized way each time (Sperber and Wilson 1986,1995). According to Sperber and Wilson’s (1995) principle of Relevance, determining the range of meaning of the quantifier some arises as part of understanding the speaker’s intended meaning and that meaning is always inferred (even when it consists in a literal interpretation of the linguistic
expressions used). The inferences involved, however, differ in the time and effort they require. Both the sentence meaning and the context contribute to making some interpretations more easily derived than others. If only sentence meaning were involved, one prediction would be that the smaller the distance between it and the speaker’s meaning, the lesser would be the time and effort required to infer the speaker’s meaning (Noveck and Sperber, 2007). Another middle-‐way strategy for uncovering scalar inference-‐making has been to break it down into identifiable stages (Geurts, 2010; Breheny et al., 2013; Barner et al., 2011). This has led to proposing substeps that include a) producing a scale, or set, of alternative terms or propositions that contain a stronger alternative, and b) assuming that the speaker is well informed about access to the stronger alternative, so that; c) the listener can determine that the speaker is not using the stronger alternative because she knows it is not true or because she lacks evidence for it. These are important assumptions to keep in mind as we turn to the processing question later. This summary does not exhaust the range of recent discussions in the “scalar” literature. For example, Katsos and Bishop’s (2008) pragmatic tolerance hypothesis proposes that differences between children and adults with respect to pragmatic abilities are due to children’s being more pragmatically tolerant than adults (see also, Davies & Katsos, 2010). Davies and Katsos write that “[children] do not consider pragmatic violations to be grave enough to warrant a rejection of or objection to the offending utterance” (i.e. using some to describe a scenario that would have been more appropriately described with all). It is also important to point out that there is a class of accounts that attribute narrowed readings to grammar (Chierchia 2001; see also, Chierchia, Fox & Spector, to appear), i.e. it is assumed that scalar inference does not draw on speakers’ intentions but on compositional semantics. According to this approach, (1a) is understood as similar to its linguistically encoded reading when in a downward entailing context (e.g. in question forms, under the scope of negation etc.) and as (1b) otherwise. This is a largely non-‐Gricean way of viewing scalar inferences and is the source of much discussion mostly in the semantics literature.
However, it has also led to cross-‐border discussions that concern the way Gricean concepts are introduced into sentence processing (see Geurts, 2010). 2.2 How have experimentalists approached the processing question? In a way analogous to the developmental data, evidence from sentence processing has largely shown how extra processing is associated with the narrowing of the more refined interpretations. While linguistically encoded readings are often sufficient for making on-‐line interpretations, more refined readings are associated with extra costs, even if they may be relatively light (e.g., see Bott, Bailey, and Grodner, 2012; Bott and Noveck, 2004; Breheny, Katsos, and Williams 2007; De Neys and Schaeken 2007). For example, in a self-‐paced reading task, examples of which are illustrated in (3) and (4), where the slashes indicate where participants manually advance the text through a keyboard, Breheny et al. showed that when a disjunction (class notes or summary) arises in an Upper-‐bound context (as in 3), it takes longer to read because the context encourages a narrowed reading that excludes the more informative conjunctive reading (class notes or summary but not both), than in a Lower-‐bound context (in 4), where the conjunctive reading remains compatible with the disjunctive phrase : (3) Upper-bound context John was taking a university course / and working at the same time. / For the exams / he had to study / from short and comprehensive sources./ Depending on the course, / he decided to read / the class notes or the summary. (4) Lower-bound context John heard that / the textbook for Geophysics / was very advanced. / Nobody understood it properly./ He heard that / if he wanted to pass the course / he should read / the class notes or the summary.
That the disjunctive phrase takes significantly longer to process in (3) than in (4) is consistent with results showing that narrowed readings are more effortful to process than those that do not call for this sort of pragmatic enrichment.
It is not just contextual factors related to the sentence that prompt
narrowed readings. Cognitive factors -‐-‐ such as extra time or fewer distractions -‐-‐ affect narrowing as do individual differences. Bott and Noveck (2004), using underinformative out-‐of-‐blue statements such as Some cows are mammals (to be evaluated as true or false), showed how false responses (which are revealing of narrowed readings of the sort not all cows are mammals) increased as allowed response times did. More specifically, false responses were significantly more likely when participants had up to three seconds to respond as opposed to roughly one second to respond. Other more psychological features can also affect narrowings. When participants are distracted by demanding secondary tasks they are less likely to produce narrowings of statements with existential quantifiers (De Neys & Schaeken, 2007). As far as individual differences are concerned, Noveck & Posada (2003) showed that one can isolate groups of individuals with respect to scalar inferences, with some seeming to prefer semantic readings and others pragmatic readings. Individual differences can be seen in on-‐line studies as well. Nieuwland et al. (2010) showed that the moment at which underinformativeness becomes apparent is generally not noticeable to most participants on line through EEG.1 Consider the word “lungs” in sentence (5), which is taken from Experiment 2 of their study and is arguably underinformative at the point at which it is expressed (since all people have lungs). Taking the participants as a group, lungs prompts an EEG profile that is indistinguishable from the word “pets” in (6) when it is
1 Electroencephalography (EEG) refers to the study of electrical activity on the scalp. Evoked Response Potentials (ERP) studies investigate characteristic patterns in these electrical activities. As far as language processing is concerned, words (in the context of a sentence) provide characteristic components that are described by their negative- or positive-going voltage fluctuations and the time at which they occur in terms of milliseconds. Thus, felicitous sentences typically have components that can be described as P300’s or N400’s etc. on certain parts of the scalp. By introducing anomalies that are compared to control sentences, one can characterize these components and make claims about types of experimental sentences. For example, Kutas and Hillyard (1980) discovered how semantic anomalies give rise to a negative-going component that peaks about 400 msec (and most obviously on the central parietal part of the scalp) after the appearance of an inappropriate word, such as socks in John buttered his bread with socks. Since then, the N400 has been known as a marker of semantic processing.
expressed, even though the latter does not have the potential to appear underinformative: (5)
Some people have lungs that require good care.
(6)
Some people have pets that require good care.
However, another Experiment –– with the same paradigm –– shows that EEG profiles appear more reactive when (a) participants are broken down into two groups based on their “Communication Score” in Baron-‐Cohen’s Autism Quotient (Baron-‐Cohen et al. 2001), where a higher score indicates that an individual is higher on the Autism Spectrum, plus when; (b) a comma is inserted prompting a sort of “clausal wrap-‐up.” For example, (5) and (6) were presented as (5’) and (6’): (5’) Some people have lungs, which require good care. (6’) Some people have pets, which require good care. With these sentences, those participants who are considered more “pragmatically skilled” (with low AQ scores) had EEG profiles with an N400 of greater magnitude to the underinformative item in a sentence such as (5’) when compared to (6’); this indicates that some sort of expectation was violated on line among this half of participants. Those who scored higher on the scale had N400’s that were less remarkable. The upshot here is that it can be demonstrated that a subgroup of participants who appear to be more pragmatically skilled go further in narrowing the meaning of a sentence on-‐line. The rest do not. The above summary shows that the narrowing of (an utterance containing) a weak scalar term is not a common occurrence nor automatic. Children are generally less likely to carry them out than adults, adults do not necessarily carry them out routinely and context is critical to making them occur. This provides the grounds for discharging Levinson’s account that argues that the enriched reading (the narrowing) occurs by default and that it can be potentially cancelled later. This is an important development. It is hard to argue – based on a wide range of data – that scalar enrichments arise by default. However, other accounts remain and, in the meantime, new accounts have emerged. This leads to the literature’s second more contemporary phase.
2.3 The on-‐line processing of scalars: How do pragmatic readings emerge? Huang and Snedeker (2009) explicitly put forward the idea that semantic readings are generally first (i.e., a definitional reading of “some” needs to be processed and before pragmatic enrichments can take place). In order to test this claim, they asked participants to point to a single character, among 4, based on objects associated with it and the way a quantity was described under ambiguous circumstances. For example, participants heard “Point to the girl that has some of the socks.” Given the circumstances, this sentence can be definitively disambiguated at its end because there were two candidates for “girl” -‐-‐ one with (a subset of the) SOCKs in the trial (with the remaining socks being held by a boy) and another with all the featured SOCCer balls. If the pragmatic interpretation were to be accessed on line, then one would expect eyes to alight on the girl with socks (because a fast narrowed reading of some ought to point to the girl with the subset of items). Instead, Huang and Snedeker found that it took a remarkably long time (600-‐800 msec) for participants to look at the girl who was associated with the partitive some (the girl with socks in this example) when compared to control items, e.g. a case where there was only one girl in the trial that was associated with a set of objects (i.e. the other girl had nothing). Huang and Snedeker’s assumed that the slowdown was due to the All case (the girl with all the SOCCer balls), which arguably remains an attractive alternative for “the girl with some of the…” until the participants got to the end of the sentence. The argument in support of this approach is that one needs to process the word before further work can be carried out, even if there are cascading bottom-‐up and top-‐down processes to contend with. There are some concerns about this influential paradigm because the study used (a) quantities that were in the subitizing range and; (b) actual numbers (2, 3) among its control items. Unlike in previous tasks, then, the potential acceptability of some to represent all is further weighted down by the possible articulation of “2” or “3” (see Degen & Tanenhaus, in prep). Although these additions can be viewed as a kind of confound, it is also reveals an important fact: that the presence of another attractive option – once it is made part of the paradigm’s common ground
-‐-‐ slows down the process of considering some as an adequate descriptor for a case demonstrating all. This implies that slowdowns are due to having other attractive options and not specifically due to a competition between some and its scalemate all (which many assume follows from the production of this scale and the rejection of the stronger sounding member). That numerals in clearly demarcated contexts can appear as or more attractive as the quantifier all lends doubt to the claim that scales are involved at all. The appeal of alternatives need not come from stronger quantifiers, but from better descriptors (once they have raised their heads in the context). It is arguably the case that a paradigm encourages participants to anticipate certain alternative adjectives and there are some that are better fits than others. While aiming to show that one can get participants to interpret some partitively without tempting participants to look at potential, alternative cases that cover some (e.g. cases representing all), Grodner et al. (2010) used Huang and Snedeker’s eye-‐tracking paradigm while presenting trials in which participants saw, e.g., three girls each representing a particular case: One girl figure would have no items associated with her, a second one would have all four mentioned items (say, four soccer balls) and a third would have two of four socks associated with her (there were also three boys, one of which would be associated with two of the other socks). So, it should be noted that there are basically three choices – All (expressed as “Alla”), Some (“Summa”), or None (“Nunna”) – each time; this makes the paradigm unique because it concretizes a lower bounded case – as in Point to the girl who has none of (pronounced nunna) the socks and makes the labeling of Summa (as well as Alla and Nunna) quite straightforward. Another feature of the paradigm is that its participants have several seconds to see and hear about the distribution of items. Overall, Grodner et al. show that one can construct cases in which partitive cases can be understood quickly under conditions when a) there are three options of which the two others (All and None) are unambiguously labeled and routinely employed; b) there are no other attractive options such as numbers; c) when participants have a relatively long time to anticipate which of 10 possible statements could be made (there are 18 total possible combinations and 8 are removed from consideration in the critical trial by virtue of the trial’s
parameters), and d) when the meaning of Some is used uniquely (i.e., entrained) as a partitive throughout in a paradigm with a fixed number of possible utterances. 2.4 At what point do mental states figure into scalar inferences? Given that an enriched reading of a scalar expression ultimately means having access to the speaker’s intention, another way to put it is that this means a listener has access to the speaker’s epistemic state. Breheny and colleagues (2013) have focused on the time at which a listener considers a speaker’s mental states as a scalar term is voiced through an eye-‐tracking paradigm. For example, they had participants listen to confederates describe a simple filmed scene in the following way after witnessing a man (from the shoulders down) pour an entire jug of water containing oranges into a bowl and part of another jug containing limes into another bowl: (7) The man has poured some of the water with limes into the bowl on tray A and all of the water with oranges into the bowl on tray B. The question is how early in the sentence do participants focus on the intended jug? More specifically, does the word “some” in the above context provide enough of a clue for the listener to fixate on the water with limes? In order to answer this question, participants were provided baseline conditions too. For example, they would see a man pour part of a jug of water containing limes and another part of another jug containing oranges before receiving the following: (8) The man has poured some of the water with limes into the bowl on tray A and some of the water with oranges into the bowl on tray B. In this case, (8), the word “some” ought not help identify the intended jug of water until the word “limes” is stated and the data confirm that. Breheny et al. report that participants were able to anticipate their looks to the correct target in the Some- early condition (in 7) as soon as they heard the quantifier ‘some’ and long before the disambiguating expression (“limes”/ “oranges”) was encountered. Their results “suggest that there is no difference in the time course of access to scalar implicatures relative to aspects of ‘what is said.’” This is an important development which shows that, in situations that allow some amount of anticipation, pragmatic
inferencing occurs in parallel with linguistic decoding. This would imply that epistemic steps can occur on-‐line, or at least earlier than has commonly been claimed. Referring Referring is a second major area that fits under the umbrella of Experimental Pragmatics, which is basically concerned with two kinds of inferential processes. One arises when a speaker is referring specifically to one object among many and adds an adjective to set it apart from the others (e.g. imagine calling an object the big star, which allows one to eliminate from consideration other small stars). Another line of research concerns the extent to which a listener indelibly links a speaker to a (newly) labeled object. We will look at each of these in turn. Work in both of these domains was inspired by Herb Clark who developed notions of common ground, which refers to shared knowledge between two people that is constantly being updated and revised. To make this concrete, if I use the name “Bart” in a conversation with a friend, I mean the Bart that is the most prominent for us, in the particular context in which I am speaking. This sort of shared knowledge is crucial for all exchanges and has been investigated for several decades now. Referring is an ideal case for discovering what is common to two interlocutors. 3.1 Referring and adjectival modification Just like a scalar expression, a referential statement could be underinformative. For example, in an investigation that predated Gricean investigations, Ironsmith & Whitehurst (1978) showed that 5-‐ to 8-‐year-‐old children rarely ask for clarification when an utterance instructs them to select one referent that could in fact refer to two (the Experimenter would say “I am thinking of the person with antennae” when there were two representations of people with antennae). Meanwhile, 9-‐ to 12-‐year-‐olds ask for clarification (“which one?”) reliably more often in such situations (see also Ackerman, 1981; Ackerman, Szymanski & Silver, 1990; for a review see Flavell et al, 1981). In more modern studies, Davies and Katsos (2010) had 5-‐year-‐old children evaluate under-‐
informative referential expressions. When a cartoon character said Pass me the star when there were two (making the statement underinformative), children – unlike the adult controls -‐-‐ considered the instruction “natural” significantly more often. All of this is comparable to the findings on scalars where children are more likely than adults to find a minimally satisfying interpretation to an underinformative statement. However, there are two differences between scalar cases and these sorts of experimental phenomena. One is that scenarios in referring tasks are routinely used to test over-‐informativity as well, while scalars cannot be used for that (at least not obviously). For example, imagine a paradigm that has a single star that is called the big star; the adjective here is essentially gratuitous for identifying the intended object. The upshot is that this literature is more concerned about the level of informativeness and felicity and less so about the separate contribution made by pragmatics with respect to the utterance’s linguistically encoded meaning. The other difference is that referring in these tasks does not necessarily (at least not intuitively) engender propositions about “what could have been said” and “scales” the way scalar phenomena do because interpretations of reference are ad-‐hoc and more contextually dependent than scalar cases (which appear to have generalized rules attached to them). Despite these impressions, it should be pointed out that one can distinguish between the linguistically encoded meaning of statement such as Point to the big star, which would be about a singular star that is considered large (for whatever reason), and a pragmatic reading, where the interpretation of the speaker’s meaning coincidentally eliminates other stars from consideration. While the modifying adjective perhaps allows for a gain in information in the contrastive case on-‐line (where there are two like objects), it is nevertheless optional since the listener can have a sufficiently meaningful interpretation of the speaker’s sentence, and point to one of the stars, without further pragmatic enrichment. However, tasks in the developmental literature have not fully explored contrastive inference within a framework that makes this distinction (though see Kronmuller et al., in press). 3.2 Referring and authorship
How integral is the speaker to reference attribution? That is, when someone refers to an object with an original label, how personal is that label? Is the listener’s (acceptance of the speaker’s) assigned name for that object linked with a specific speaker? Before answering these questions, it is important to provide some background by way of terminology. We begin with lexical entrainment which refers to the way interlocutors attribute names to objects and maintain them for the length of a conversation (Brennan & Clark, 1996). When a speaker refers to a shoe as a loafer (to distinguish it, say, from a sneaker) the hearer is likely to maintain that description for the remainder of an exchange, even if later the more general term shoe would do. This indicates that a conceptual pact between interlocutors takes precedence over being just informative enough on each occasion. This leads to the last remaining coinage – preemption – which refers to the way in which an accepted label for an item blocks listeners from accepting new names for it (Kronmüller & Barr, 2007). Keysar and colleagues (2000) argued that a listener does not immediately take into consideration the speaker’s point of view. This egocentrism claim is based on experimental work that presents several objects distributed in the slots of a 4X4 grid. Whereas addressees can see all the grid’s objects, speakers can see only 12 of these (the remaining four are blocked by screens). Keysar et al.’s eye-‐tracking data indicate that -‐-‐ for situations where a speaker’s intended reference could only be an object that is commonly viewed -‐-‐ listeners cannot prevent themselves from fixating to some extent on a non-‐intended item (one that matches the speaker’s description even though it is out of the speaker’s view) before fixating on the intended referent. Metzing and Brennan (2003) argue that the sharing of intentions between interlocutors is so central to the referential process that the speaker herself is part of the preemption process. So, pragmatic expectations are linked to specific partners in a conversation and thus the partner’s epistemic states (E. V. Clark, 1990; Metzing & Brennan, 2003; Brown-‐Schmidt, 2009; Brennan & Hanna, 2009). Evidence cited in favor of this approach includes the prediction that a listener should not experience preemption when another speaker provides a newly coined
name for a previously-‐named object. In testing this claim, Metzing & Brennan, (2003) employed an eye-‐tracking paradigm in which a confederate (a “Director”) would provide a participant (a “Matcher”) with instructions to move small objects to new locations within a vertical 5-‐by-‐5 grid of entirely open cubbyholes. By measuring the duration of time between the onset of a referring expression and first-‐looks to the target (as well as touches to the target), they could determine how fast a listener makes referential commitments when the same (“original”) Director comes up with a new name for a previously-‐named object as opposed to when a new Director does so. They reported a slowdown only when the same Director came up with a new name and took this as support for their hypothesis. The debate does not end there. In support of a perspective-‐free account (meaning that the listener incorporates the named object without necessarily linking the speaker to the label), Kronmuller and Barr (2007) recorded eye-‐ movements linked to referent assignment as the process unfolds in a situation similar to Metzing and Brennan’s (2003). They reported that a tendency to avoid mapping a new expression onto an already-‐named referent emerged soon after a new referring expression is heard, independently of whether the speaker uttering the expression was new to the situation or not. In other words, when a new name for an old object was offered, there was an identifiable recovery process regardless of who the speaker was (the same speaker or a different one). Furthermore, Shintel and Keysar (2007) report that listeners took more time to map an old referent into a new expression, independently of whether the conversational precedent for that object was established by the speaker to the listener or by another speaker to the listener. Future work will no doubt clarify whether speakers are integral to recognizing labels. Metaphor The study of metaphor comprehension has a long history in the psycholinguistics literature with most of it revolving around its temporal signature. On the one hand, there has long been the assumption that metaphor processing is exceptional which implies that it should be linked with extra
processing and slowdowns. Formally, many cite Gricean models as a theoretical basis for this approach since he argued that a sentence is recognized as non-‐literal once that it violates the maxim of quality (“Do not say what you believe to be false”) and engenders a process needing resolution. Thus, in order to understand that a speaker did not literally mean “my son is a pig,” one must search out an alternative while maintaining Grice’s Cooperative Principle, which assumes that interlocutors are indeed cooperative (Gerrig and Healy, 1983). On the other hand, several researchers have shown that there is nothing exceptional about metaphor processing and that reaction times can be shown to be comparable to literal controls when given the right context (see Gibbs, 2002 for a review). This has been the basis of much back and forth in the psycholinguistic literature. Here, we take a look at three theories that have dominated discussion on this matter in the experimental literature. 4.1 The Standard Pragmatic Model The Standard Pragmatic Model (SPM) evolved from the work of Grice (1975) and Searle (1979) and is one of the earliest and most influential approaches to the comprehension of figurative language. At its simplest, the so-‐called SPM is a three-‐step process that involves 1) the computation of the semantic/literal meaning; 2) the recognition of a violation of a maxim; and 3) the computation of an implicature. One can see how the architecture of Grice’s seminal work can be directly translated into a psychological explanation for understanding many non-‐ literal uses of language, including metaphor. It has been difficult to establish that these three steps actually occur (let alone in such an order) and, more fatally, such a three-‐step process seems too long and slow for explaining the rapid on-‐line pragmatic processing of an utterance, which has led to conflicting results. On the one hand, studies like Janus & Bever’s (1985) are compatible with the Standard Pragmatic Model as are ERP studies that reveal greater processing cost for a metaphor over a literal utterance (e.g., Pynte et al., 1996; Lai et al, 2009). On the other hand, more recent accounts (e.g., see a summary of the Direct Access view below) tend to argue against it. These latter data have made it easy for critics to rail against the SPM and, in so doing, the entire Gricean approach.
It should be pointed out, however, that Grice never intended his model to be used as a model of actual language processing. The way Gricean theory is transformed into “the SPM” is emblematic of a common pitfall in the Cognitive Sciences (see Marr, 1982); one can advance theoretically at three different levels – often referred to as the computational, algorithmic and implementational levels of analysis – and that progress can be made by keeping the three levels separate and complementary.2 4.2 The Direct Access View More recently, Gibbs (1994, 2002) has offered an approach to figurative language comprehension that directly contrasts with the SPM. Gibbs’s approach, the Direct Access View, suggests similar processing mechanisms for both figurative and literal language. According to this view, the comprehension of figurative language does not involve special cognitive processes (Gibbs, 1994; Gibbs & Moise, 1997). This assumption is based on the notion that comprehending literal as well as non-‐literal meanings of a sentence largely depends on pragmatic knowledge and listeners’ figurative modes of thought (Gibbs, 1994, 2002). Furthermore, Gibbs suggests that literal and non-‐literal meanings are not distinct from each other since they are both determined by contextual information. By using pragmatic knowledge together with contextual information, the analysis of some aspects of word meaning should be sufficient for understanding intended figurative meanings (Gibbs, 1999, 2002). Evidence in favor of the Direct Access View also comes from some classic comprehension studies showing that latencies for comprehending literal and figurative readings of similar target-‐sentences can be rendered comparable as a function of context (e.g., Ortony, 1978; Gildea and Glucksberg, 1982; Blasko and Connine, 1993). 2 The computational level makes explicit the input and output of the process as well as the
constraints that would allow a specified problem to be solved. The algorithmic level describes how to get from input to output, and specifically determines which representations have to be used and which processes have to be employed in order to build and manipulate the representations. The implementational level provides a description of the physical system that should realize the process at, say, the neuronal level. Grice’s theory was designed at the computational level; the SPM was invented to practically mimic it at the algorithmic level (see Noveck & Spotorno, in press). However, this amount of resemblance, as Marr argued, is neither necessary nor recommended. One can do theoretical work at the computational level without recourse to the algorithmic or implementational levels and similarly for any level with respect to the other two.
For example, Inhoff et al (1984), have shown that metaphorical expressions are understood as quickly as literal ones when they are preceded by an extensive context that practically primes the metaphorical interpretation (see the target sentence in 9.c in the context of 9.a versus 9.b). (9.a) Severe criticisms of Europe's oldest dictator came from within Spain and without. For 35 years Franco was barraged with these constant criticisms. To the end, the struggle continued between the ruthless dictator and his critics. (9.b) Iceland's coastal region was windswept. The angry arctic winds often buffeted the fishing villages located on the numerous bays and inlets. The darkening skies and the rising winds announced the onset of another storm (9.c) Target: The waves beat relentlessly against the rugged coastline. On the contrary, when just a short prior context is provided (essentially, the first sentences of 9.a and 9.b), the comprehension of a metaphoric reading requires more effort than that of a literal sentence. This sort of finding is a central to the metaphor-‐processing literature and calls for explanation. We will return to this shortly as we summarize the remaining approaches. 4.3 The Graded Salience Hypothesis The Standard Pragmatic Model and the Direct Access view can be considered two extremes of a spectrum that other proposals can then fill. One of the most influential accounts that fills the gap is the Graded Salience Hypothesis (Giora, 1997). According to this proposal, the initial processing of lexical information is an encapsulated and graded process in which salient meanings of words or expressions are retrieved from the mental lexicon (Giora, 2003). During initial processing, contextual information is processed in parallel but neither interacts with lexical processes nor inhibits salient meanings when contextually incompatible (e.g., Giora, 2002; Peleg, Giora, & Fein, 2001). Salience is a function of properties such as familiarity, prototypicality and frequency; in order to be salient,
the meaning of a word has to be encoded into the mental lexicon. In case words or expressions have multiple meanings varying in salience, Giora (2003) suggests that this process is graded: more salient meanings are accessed earlier than less salient meanings. Thus, most salient meanings are always accessed initially irrespective of their literality or contextual support. This implies that the processing of figurative sentences only diverges from that of literal sentences during later phases of processing if accessed salient meanings cannot be integrated with contextual information. In that case the salient meanings have to give way to less salient but contextually appropriate meanings. As opposed to the Direct Access View, contextual information is proposed to have a very limited impact because they cannot restrict initial access of salient meanings that might be contextually incompatible. Evidence for the Graded Salience Hypothesis comes from behavioral studies that investigate the comprehension of metaphors. For example, Giora & Fein (1999) have shown that familiar metaphors can be processed as easily as literal remarks, while unconventional metaphors seem to require more effort. Further support comes from a study by Lai and colleagues (2009) who showed that conventional and unconventional metaphors differentially modulate the ERP component known as the P600. 4.4 Metaphor as viewed by Relevance Theory As we highlighted, metaphor represents an interesting case for Experimental Pragmatics (see also Bambini & Resta, 2012) because utterances need not be literally true in order for a listener to draw implications effectively. For example, consider a scenario in which a swimming instructor says to a 5-‐year-‐ old, you are a tadpole. The utterance is a) not literally true while effectively conveying information from teacher to student and it; b) goes further than its literal equivalent (which one can imagine if one is talking directly to a tadpole, for some reason); at the very least, the instructor's expression is arguably endearing when speaking to a young child whereas the literal equivalent is not. This sort of analysis has been fruitful in describing at least three kinds of experimental results with respect to metaphor.
First, Noveck, Bianco, & Castry (2001; also see Almor et al., 2007) showed, through reading times, that children are less likely than adults to fully appreciate metaphoric references and that adult reading times of metaphoric sentences, which take longer to read than literal controls, come with a deeper processing (as determined by responses to comprehension questions). That is, children -‐-‐ having fewer cognitive resources available than adults -‐-‐ are weaker than their older cohorts at accessing metaphoric meanings while adults draw out more cognitive effects from metaphoric references than they do from literal ones. Second, the enhancement of relevant properties of the metaphor vehicle, and suppression of those that are irrelevant for the figurative interpretation, is a necessary process in metaphor comprehension. Consider a cross-‐modal lexical priming study by Rubio-‐Fernandez (2007), which presented vignettes aurally and concluded with a metaphor. At the end of a vignette, a probe word appeared on a screen immediately or either 400 or 1000 msec later. These probes required participants to determine whether they were spelled correctly (with the idea being that a relatively quick lexical decision –– a “yes, it is spelled correctly” –– reveals that the metaphor activated the probe word at the time of decision). For example, participants would read (10): (10) Nobody wanted to run against John at school. John was a cheetah. These sentences were followed with what was referred to as a superordinate probe such as cat or an unrelated probe, e.g. plant (a superordinate from another trial). The decision latencies for those who got the probe at 400 msec showed a preference for processing the superordinate probe over the unrelated one (644 vs. 698 msec, respectively), which disappeared when measured against those who got the probe at 1000 msec (791 vs. 799 msec, respectively). One can see that the categorical information no longer had much impact on the listener’s processing a full second after finishing the sentence. In contrast, when the probes presented were akin to fast (which is the relevant feature of being a cheetah in the example) and it was compared to an unrelated one, e.g., tall (a non-‐relevant feature pulled from a metaphor in another vignette), the decision latencies for those who got the probe at 400 msec showed a slight preference for the former over the latter (658 vs. 710 msec, respectively) and it remained disparate at 1000 msec (598 vs. 651
msec, respectively). Both of these remained faster than all the so-‐called superordinate cases. As Rubio Fernández wrote, her results support the notion that “metaphor interpretation involves enhancing relevant properties of the metaphor vehicle while suppressing irrelevant ones.” These results are in line with the Relevance idea of loose talk. According to the Relevance-‐theoretic account the process of adjustment of the meaning encoded in a linguistic constituents requires the interaction among the lexical encoded concepts, the concepts that are encoded in other constituents of the utterance and contextual information. The outcome of this process is an ad hoc concept which has been derived by inferential processes under the specific circumstances of an utterance and which is valid only under those circumstances. In this way, for example, the word “raw” in the utterance: “This steak is raw” communicates the concept RAW* (the symbol * indexes the ad hoc concept) that is slightly different from the lexical concept RAW. With the deflationary account of metaphor (to indicate that metaphor is not special), Relevance theorists have proposed that the same process of adjustment allows one to derive the metaphorical interpretation in an expression such as “John is a cheetah” (Sperber and Wilson, 2008; Wilson and Carston, 2007). In the end, the comprehension process of a metaphor should come along the same path of all other loose uses of language, such as approximations (e.g., “The water is boiling” when the water very hot) and hyperboles (e.g., “The water is boiling” when the water is just warm). The third sort of finding that shows how an apt metaphor is dependent on context comes from more classic studies mentioned earlier, showing how the amount of background information available for the addressee affects the processing of a metaphorical expression (e.g. see, Gildea and Glucksberg, 1982; Gibbs and Gerrig, 1989; Pynte et al. 1996; Inhoff et al, 1984). Findings such as these suggest that one ought to place metaphor along a continuum of cognitive effort. At one end, there are simple literal expressions that demand little effort since they represent no unnecessary, extra load when processing sentences. At the other end, one can imagine anomalous sentences, apparently too effortful to be resolved because neither the concepts engendered nor the context are helpful in
processing the sentence. Metaphor floats between these two extremes according to the conceptual load and the contextual support. While Relevance Theory describes these data well, a lot of work remains. For one thing, the complex notion of context has to be further disentangled. Another is that the link between conceptual load and context needs to be explored further because these two main variables have to interact in order for a listener to grasp the intended meaning of a metaphoric utterance. Irony From the perspective of Paul Grice, irony, like metaphor, is a departure from a norm of literal truthfulness used to convey a related figurative meaning or implicature. Irony is said to be understood because (as with metaphor) the speaker is blatantly violating the first maxim of Quality, which then triggers implicatures that can be calculated from the literal meaning of the sentence. Although initially influential, the Gricean account is now increasingly in doubt due mostly to its emphasis on the presence of maxim-‐violations that are not always apparent. For example, consider the utterance: “I love sunny days!” when it is said during a downpour. The utterance is ironic and is probably true as well, but there are no identifiable maxim violations. 5.1 Echoic-‐mention theory The first challenge to Grice’s approach came from the Echoic mention theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1981; Wilson, 2009; Jorgensen, Miller, & Sperber, 1984). According to this account, the speaker of irony is not expressing her own thoughts, but echoing a thought that can be attributed to some real or prototypical speaker while expressing a dissociative (mocking, skeptical or contemptuous) attitude to that thought. When our fictive interlocutor says “I love sunny days!” on a cold and rainy day, what makes the utterance ironic is that the speaker is harking back to a possible and an appropriate remark for desired weather. As Wilson (2009, page 197) writes: … the point of irony is not to commit the speaker to the truth of the proposition expressed but, on the contrary, to express a certain
type of derisory or dissociative attitude to a thought with a similar content that she attributes to some source other than herself at the current time. In other words, the speaker of irony is not expressing her own thoughts, but echoing a thought she attributes to someone else, and expressing her mocking, skeptical or contemptuous attitude to that thought. Through echoing the speaker makes her attitude apparent. One of the earliest experimental studies on irony investigated Echoic Mention Theory. Jorgensen, Miller & Sperber (1984) investigated how an explicit antecedent remark can impact the later comprehension of an ironic remark. For example, imagine two opera singers who are anticipating their evening’s performance when one says: “Tonight will be great!” which is uttered before the evening takes a negative turn. A later ironic remark of the sort “That was a superb performance” is harking back to the speaker’s earlier expectations. Jorgenson et al. (1984) predicted that participants would find the same ironic target sentence harder to understand if the context does not include such an explicit antecedent reference to the ironic speaker’s expectations. The results of their questionnaire confirmed these predictions and provided the literature with the first set of data in support of the Echoic Theory. Later, Francesca Happé, in her seminal paper on pragmatic abilities in Autism Spectrum Disorders (1993), revealed that only autistic people with intact high level mindreading abilities (namely the second-‐ order Theory of Mind, which is the ability to interpret someone’s thought about someone else’s thought) are able to correctly interpret ironies. Happé’s study provided strong evidence in favor of Sperber and Wilson’s analysis of linguistic communication, which includes the Echoic account of irony under the umbrella of Relevance theory (e.g., Sperber & Wilson, 1986; Wilson & Sperber, 2012b). 5.2 Pretense Theory Clark and Gerrig (1984) proposed an alternative view which they called a “Pretense Theory of Irony.” The main idea behind the Pretense account is that the speaker of an ironical utterance is not herself performing a speech act (e.g. making an assertion or asking a question) but pretending to perform one, in order to
convey a mocking, skeptical or contemptuous attitude. This pretense mood would make an utterance ironic. With "I love sunny days," the speaker is pretending to be an unseeing person, perhaps a weather forecaster, exclaiming to an unknowing audience how much she likes beautiful weather. She intends the addressee to see through the pretense—in such rain she obviously could not be making the exclamation on her own behalf—and to see that she is thereby ridiculing the sort of person who would make such an exclamation (e.g., the weather forecaster). The addressee can take "delight" in "the secret intimacy" shared with the speaker in recognizing that ignorance (Clark & Gerrig, 1984, 122). While the Echoic-‐mention and Pretense accounts each give primacy to the accessing of a speaker’s attitude, they differ with respect to the object of the ironic remark. For Sperber & Wilson, it is some previously stated remark or shared cultural norm and for Clark & Gerrig, it is practically a parody of the speaker who would have made such a remark. It should also be noted that while Grice focused on the blatant violation of truth in irony, he also took attitude into consideration (Grice, 1989, p. 53) for he recognized that a “hostile or derogatory judgment or a feeling such as indignation or contempt” had a role to play in understanding it; nevertheless, as Deirdre Wilson pointed out to us, Grice never “officially” introduced attitude ascription into his theory). Point is that all three of these seminal accounts agree that the communication of the speaker’s attitude is crucial to the comprehension of irony. 5.3 Irony as viewed by the psycholinguistic literature Despite these early views on irony, which clearly took into account concerns about Theory of Mind, a different debate arose in the psycholinguistic literature on the immediacy with which ironic interpretations are made when compared to literal readings. This is because Gibbs, in his processing paper (Gibbs, 1986), argued strongly against Grice’s “Standard Pragmatic Model” by pointing out that irony (and especially sarcasm) gives rise to the intended reading without requiring a contrast between the literal reading and a given situation that blatantly violates a maxim. Central to Gibbs’s account, known as the Direct Access View, is the assumption that a figurative interpretation is constructed “directly” by the early integration of lexical and contextual information. Much recent work presents
evidence as support for the Graded Salience Hypothesis (Filik & Moxey, 2010; Giora, 1997; Giora & Fein, 1999; Giora, Fein, Kaufman, Eisenberg, & Erez, 2009) and sets itself up as being in opposition to the Direct Access view also in the case of Irony processing. Remarkably, the debate about the comprehension process of irony mimics the debate about metaphor processing; however, the similarities between the two pragmatic phenomena are largely superficial. It is true that both of them are instances of figurative language and both irony and metaphor are usually viewed as literally false utterances, but mechanisms behind the two phenomena are rather different. In the section on metaphor we described a process of enrichment and adjustment of the concepts conveyed by critical words such as “cheetah” in “John is a cheetah” as crucial to metaphor comprehension. In contrast, the hallmark of irony comprehension is the interpretation of the speaker’s attitude instead of the enrichment of the literal meaning of the utterance. This is quite different. Let us return to our two opera singers who recognize that they gave an awful performance and that after the show one singer tells the other: (11) “Tonight we gave a superb performance.” In order to reach the ironic interpretation of (11) one has to go beyond the linguistic code and grasp the speaker’s dissociative attitude (see e.g., Wilson and Sperber, 2012; Clark and Gerrig, 1984), but this process does not pass through the adjustment of the concepts that are conveyed by the words “superb performance”. The lexical meaning of those words is good enough to trigger the ironic interpretation. The more recent debates are about the surface features of the words used in irony and their effect on the speed of processing. This is partly due to the effort of transferring the Direct Access versus Graded Salience debate to irony. The net result is that the processing literature hardly considers a role for attitude ascription in irony. 5.4 Reconciling theory and experimentation In order to right this perceived imbalance, we -‐-‐ the authors of this chapter -‐ -‐ have embarked on a series of investigations that aim to show the extent to which
irony depends on Theory of Mind (ToM). One central study (Spotorno et al., 2012) uses fMRI because the cerebral areas associated with ToM have been extensively investigated in the cognitive neuroscience literature. In that study, we compared participants’ comprehension of 18 target sentences (such as the one in 11) as contexts make them either ironic or literal (to render (11) literal all one has to do is say that they hit their notes with success). That work demonstrated that the ToM network becomes more active while a participant is understanding a verbal irony when compared to activity of those same areas while reading literal equivalents. Moreover, they demonstrate -‐-‐ through Psychophysiological Interactions (PPI) analyses -‐-‐ that ToM activity is directly linked with language comprehension processes. The paradigm, its predictions, and the reported results contrasted dramatically with those from seven prior fMRI studies. More importantly, it re-‐ establishes the central role played by ToM in irony research (also see Spotorno et al., in press). Summary We have covered four different areas of Experimental Pragmatic research – scalar inference, referring, metaphor and irony. While each may have a different historical development, each investigates the gap between the linguistically encoded meaning of an utterance, on the one hand, and its intended meaning and its effects, on the other. Besides guiding research, this distinction highlights different aspects of pragmatic processing. Scalar inference involves enrichments of a potentially underinformative lexical item. Questions about referring are aimed at determining the range of implications about what objects are excluded and who made the reference. Metaphor is concerned about the way a literally false sentence can become meaningful by making salient aspects of a word’s meaning and irony is concerned about understanding the speaker’s attitude. Despite our best efforts to be inclusive, we had space to present only four areas that are arguably among the most well developed. Of course, this does not cover everything. To name a few areas that we did not discuss but could have, consider how prosody can influence speaker meaning (Chevallier et al., 2010) as well as topics such as metonymy (Schumacher, in press) and indirect requests (Van der Henst & Sperber, 2004; Basnakova et al., in press). Experimental
Pragmatics can also be the forum for understanding the way exceptional populations, such as those on the autism spectrum, deal with pragmatically interesting cases (Noveck et al., 2007; Pijnaker et al., 2009; Chevallier et al. 2011). All of these topics fall under Experimental Pragmatics and make for a rich database. At the root of most of these studies is the divide between linguistically encoded meanings and intended meanings. This distinction drives experimental endeavors, reveals robust effects that any theory would need to account for and, importantly, establishes a forum for resolving important debates in linguistic-‐ pragmatics.
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