Composition in context: Contextual effects on the online processing of eventive coercion

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

We propose to investigate the interaction of contextual information with shifts in meaning during the composition of complex expressions (= coercion). The nature of contextual influences on compositional processes is central for long lasting debates about the architecture of the semantics-pragmatics interface. As a starting point the proposed project will take two alternative views on the nature of this interface: a) a modular account according to which sentence meaning is initially processed in isolation from pragmatic information or b) an interactive account with semantic and pragmatic information percolating into the composition of complex meaning right from the start. Existing experimental research has employed the phenomenon of coercion as the primary tool to study the online processing of compositional processes with great success, but so far the role of contextual information has been largely ignored. Building on our existing work on coercion phenomena, we plan to study interactions between the sentence and the larger discourse context in four lines of study. Firstly, we will look at aspectual enrichment during the composition of complex event representations to investigate whether information from the preceding discourse context can immediately be combined with information from the sentence. Secondly, we will study cases of aspectual impoverishment in which information in the sentence requires a reinterpretation of the event representation that has been built up for the preceding discourse context. Thirdly, we will investigate contextual resolution of aspectual ambiguity, i.e. coercion sentences which allow for two different coercion operations with two different corresponding event representations only one of which is contextually supported. Finally, we will extend existing research on contextual effects on complement coercion aiming at a better understanding of the underlying operations in deriving compositional meaning.The findings of the project will significantly improve the field both empirically and theoretically. Focusing on local contextual adjustments during online composition the proposed project will make an important contribution to extend pragmatic theory towards real-time processing. On the empirical side, we will gather offline, eyetracking and ERP data to gain a better understanding of the cognitive foundations involved in deriving complex meaning in context.The proposed project focuses on the main goal of the XPrag.de: New Pragmatic Theories based on Experimental Evidence by addressing the question how theories on the architecture of the semantics/pragmatics interface can be transformed into more precise theories of context dependence of semantic composition. Crucially, we will consider the temporal and neural underpinnings of language processing, utilizing a broad range of experimental methods.