H2020Индивидуална стипендия2019–2021

Selfish discourse · Underspecification in spoken and written discourse: interpretation, compensation and cognitive implications

„Хоризонт 2020“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2019-02-01 → 2021-01-31
Финансиране от ЕС: 195 455 €
Участници: 1
Схема: MSCA-IF

Линиите свързват координатора с партньорите.

Накратко на български

Свързващите думи в английския и френския език се анализират чрез сравнение между общи и конкретни изрази, като например разликата между „и“ и „следователно“. Това помага да се разбере кога сме двусмислени в речта си и как мозъкът обработва информацията.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

Underspecification in spoken and written discourse: interpretation, compensation and cognitive implications

This project examines weak connectives in relation to their stronger alternatives (e.g. 'and' vs. 'so' vs. 'therefore'), to their linguistic environment and to their communicative context, in spoken and written French and English. Their importance and pervasiveness in everyday discourse calls for a better understanding of the contextual and cognitive constraints to their use and interpretation, focusing in particular on their relation to cognitive load, planning pressure and genre standards. In other words, when and why are we ambiguous when we connect our discourse? The project is rooted in usage-based linguistics insofar as it considers corpus frequency, association patterns and the role of context as crucial in the analysis of authentic data and how they reflect cognitive processes. It adopts a synchronic multi-method approach to the production and comprehension of connectives in spoken and written English and French, on a continuum from weakest to strongest markers of coherence relations and other pragmatic functions. I describe the conditions for the use of weak connectives, the types of elements that compensate for their weakly encoded processing instruction, and their impact on comprehension. To do so, I have developed a solid theoretical and methodological framework to analyze weak connectives, combining corpus-based and experimental paradigms. The results refine the divide between explicit and implicit relations by introducing weak and strong connectives in the continuum.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

This research project focuses on underspecification, i.e. the imprecise use of words to express meanings which are not fully encoded in the semantics of the words themselves but which rely on common ground and other linguistic cues to be interpreted. I address in particular how underspecification explains the variable use of three French discourse markers and their English equivalents, namely ""et"" / ""and"", ""mais"" / ""but"" and ""donc"" / ""so"". This project seeks to establish the contextual and cognitive constraints to the production and interpretation of underspecified discourse markers by (i) analyzing their distribution and cooccurrence patterns in spoken, written and computer-mediated English and French and (ii) experimentally assessing their impact on discourse processing. This research thus combines corpus-based and experimental methods, as advocated by cognitivists.According to the selfish hypothesis, underspecification is a failure of recipient design and is thus expected to be more frequent in unplanned speech and computer-mediated writing, where speakers/writers are under higher cognitive pressure than in planned speech/writing. Furthermore, this project intends to show that register-sensitive patterns of co-occurrence constitute compensatory strategies designed to minimize the potentially detrimental effect of underspecification in processing complexity. Register and cooccurrence patterns are thus considered as windows onto underlying cognitive mechanisms of interpretation. SELFISH DISCOURSE will elucidate the relationship between a discourse marker and its co(n)text, teasing out their respective semantic-pragmatic contributions to the construal of senses and coming to terms with the theoretical overlap between polysemy, multifunctionality and underspecification. By combining corpus-based and experimental methods, this project contributes to a growing trend of linguistic research and fills a gap on the cross-modal study of underspecified discourse markers.""

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH · EdinburghКоординаторОбединеното кралство