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.
Titel: Projected common ground and high negation polar questions in Mandarin Chinese
Abstract: In English, high negation polar questions such as Doesn’t he like basketball? have been reported to carry a strong positive epistemic bias, i.e., the speaker previously believed that the positive answer is true (Ladd 1981; Han 1998; Büring and Gunlogson 2000). This talk develops a semantic analysis of Mandarin high negation polar questions such as (1). I argue that these questions have a broader contextual distribution than their English counterparts, and that this distribution can be explained by combining a semantics of high negation with pragmatic reasoning about the projected common ground (cf. Romero and Han 2004; Krifka 2017). (1) ta bushixihuan lanqiu ma? he bushi like basketball Q ‘Doesn’t he like basketball?’ More specifically, high negation bushi, like propositional negation, has both a positive presuppositional component and a negative assertive component, but these components target the discourse status of the prejacent. It presupposes that the prejacent is in the projected common ground, rather than merely that the speaker believed it to be true, and asserts that the prejacent is not in the projected common ground. On this analysis, bushi…ma questions are licensed when the speaker takes the prejacent to be commonly known or generally accepted, but encounters contextual resistance, for instance when the addressee may fail to believe, accept, or be aware of the information expressed by the prejacent.
Title: Multimodal prominence in information structure: Evidence from focus and givenness
Abstract: This talk discusses studies that explore the interplay between prosody and gesture in the expression of information structure, adopting a multimodal perspective. Focusing on the multimodal marking of the information status of discourse referents and of different focus types, a unifying observation emerges: increasing pragmatic salience—whether due to increased informativity or contrastivity—correlates with stronger multimodal prominence. This is reflected in an increase of both acoustic/prosodic and kinematic/visual cues contributing to prominence marking. The reviewed findings are discussed with reference to theoretical accounts on the coupling of prosodic and visual modalities. The conclusion is that research on multimodal marking of information structure points to the clear role of multimodal prominence in signaling informativity and contrastivity. Yet research remains relatively sparse, underscoring the need for future studies that systematically investigate both the integration and interaction of auditory and visual modalities in signaling information structure.
