Abstract
In this talk, I will present a pragmatic account of referential communication that stands in contrast with traditional accounts in the Gricean tradition by focusing on perceptual discriminability rather than informativity. According to this new account, referential over-specification can result in efficient speaker-hearer coordination, rather than being pragmatically infelicitous. The results of a series of language-production experiments support the view that speakers are efficient when producing redundant size and colour adjectives, doing so more often when modification could facilitate the hearer's search for the referent in the visual display. English speakers also used redundant colour adjectives more often than Spanish speakers, supporting the hypothesis that redundant adjectives are more efficient in prenominal than in postnominal position. Regarding comprehension, a series of cross-linguistic eye tracking studies confirm that redundant modification can facilitate target identification. Finally, I will present a probabilistic model of referential communication and contrastive inferences. Overall, the results of these studies confirm that redundancy helps efficient referential communication.
About the speaker
I work in experimental pragmatics, which employs methods from psycholinguistics to investigate theoretical pragmatics. My research centers around four areas: lexical pragmatics (or how we modulate word meanings in context), figurative language interpretation (particularly metaphor), referential communication (how people produce and interpret referential expressions) and Theory of Mind (more specifically, false-belief reasoning).
In my studies I have investigated the pragmatic abilities of both children and adults using a variety of behavioural methods (e.g., language production and reading times) as well as eye-tracking (continuous recording of eye movements during language processing).
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Zoom
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