Linguistics Colloquium 10/12 - Pranav Anand
Speaker: Pranav Anand (UC Santa Cruz)
Title: Assessing the pragmatics of experiments: The case of scalar implicature
Date/Time: Friday, Oct 12, 3:30-5p
Location: 32-141
There is a growing impetus to examine pragmatic phenomena experimentally.
Potentially complicating these investigations is the way in which the
experimental environment itself shapes participants’ models of
extra‐linguistic context. A spate of recent results collectively suggest
that the computation of scalar implicature may be sensitive to a host of
factors: task structure, social norms, and type of response elicited.
However, these results provide only a few points in a vast space of
potential task parameters, thereby limiting our ability to systematically
model the interaction between linguistic forms, context and pragmatic
inference. This talk reports ongoing work to systematically investigate the
parametric space of task design. We find that implicature calculation rates
are sensitive to both the structure of the response elicited (e.g., scalar
vs. unordered) as well as the task prompt (whether the participant judges
“accuracy”, “informativity”, or “goodness”), and discuss the methodological
lessons of this kind of work.