Alexandra Lorson
Published: 21 January 2019
Listeners’ understanding of information that is backgrounded by speakers, and ways their interpretations may be influenced by contextual factors.
University of Edinburgh
Listeners’ understanding of information that is backgrounded by speakers, and ways their interpretations may be influenced by contextual factors.
In interviews, courtrooms, political debates, and advertisement, speakers notoriously use different strategies to background information, i.e. convey information as a known fact. For example, the reappearing election slogan `Making America great again’, not only conveys the aim to make America great but also backgrounds that America used to be great; implying that regaining the former greatness depends on political change. The challenge for linguistics is to account for listeners’ understanding of these different layers of meaning.
What my thesis aims to do is to use recent advances in psycholinguistic and computational methodologies to address these long-standing questions. More specifically, I will empirically test (i) listeners’ sensitivity to distinctions in how meaning is conveyed, (ii) possible distinctions between background strategies, and (iii) the impact of discourse context on the way such information is interpreted. Subsequently, I will use these findings to propose an improved model of speaker and hearer knowledge in order to better understand how speakers and listeners converge on an intended meaning.
First published: 21 January 2019