Title: Emoji meanings between symbolic and iconic hypothesis: Experimental evidence
Abstract: Two hypotheses have been proposed for modeling the semantics of emojislinguistically: that they are interpreted as depictions, for example of theauthor's face in the case of face emojis (Maier 2023; the iconic or pictorialhypothesis), or that they function basically like words in digitalcommunication (e.g., Grosz et al. 2023; the lexicalist or symbolic hypothesis).I will report on a range of psycholinguistic experiments aiming to position themeaning of emojis in relation to these two hypotheses. I show that emojimeaning is at least partially conventionalized and also depends on itssyntactic context (e.g., for at-issue vs. non-at-issue contributions). We alsohave new results regarding the cross-linguistic and cross-generationaldifferences in emoji interpretation. The work was carried out with PatrickGrosz, Lea Fricke and others within the Visual Communication (ViCom) cluster.
Title: Common ground: Between formal pragmatics and psycholinguistics
Abstract: In a review paper forthcoming in the Annual Review of Linguistics, Rubio-Fernandez and Harris introduce cognitive pluralism as the idea that we have more than one solution to the problem of choosing and representing shared background information—or the problem of common ground. A cognitive-pluralist model of common ground should consider both the sources of variability in common ground use, as well as its processing demands. In this talk, I will first discuss both requirements in the context of psycholinguistic models of common ground. I will then take stock of the findings and conclusions of experimental studies of common ground, and explore future directions in line with cognitive pluralism.
