LINGUIST List 22.3948 Mon Oct 10 2011 Review: Pragmatics; Psycholing; Semantics: Meibauer & Steinbach (2011) Editor for this issue: Rajiv Rao <rajivlinguistlist.org> This LINGUIST List issue is a review of a book published by one of our supporting publishers, commissioned by our book review editorial staff. We welcome discussion of this book review on the list, and particularly invite the author(s) or editor(s) of this book to join in. If you are interested in reviewing a book for LINGUIST, look for the most recent posting with the subject "Reviews: AVAILABLE FOR REVIEW", and follow the instructions at the top of the message. You can also contact the book review staff directly. Directory         1.     Mary Shapiro , Experimental Pragmatics/Semantics Message 1: Experimental Pragmatics/Semantics Date: 10-Oct-2011 From: Mary Shapiro <mshapirotruman.edu> Subject: Experimental Pragmatics/Semantics E-mail this message to a friend Discuss this message Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/22/22-1967.html EDITORS: Meibauer, Jörg; Steinbach, Markus TITLE: Experimental Pragmatics/Semantics SERIES: Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 175 PUBLISHER: John Benjamins YEAR: 2011 Mary Shapiro, Department of English & Linguistics, Truman State University SUMMARY This volume is a collection of original papers, which are expanded versions of presentations given at the February 2008 Experimental Pragmatics/Semantics workshop at the Annual Meeting of the German Linguistics Society (held at the University of Bamberg, Germany). Its stated aim is “to advance the current debate among theoretical and experimental linguists on the interface between pragmatics and semantics.” It focuses particularly on providing empirical data for the classical Gricean distinction between 'what is said' and 'what is implicated.' It is aimed at theoretical linguists, psycho- and neurolinguists, and philosophers of language. The Introduction, by the volume editors Jörg Meibauer and Markus Steinbach, entitled “Experimental research at the pragmatics/semantics interface,” provides an overview of the large theoretical debates in the field: e.g. Neogriceans (i.e. those who “tend to defend the conceptual value of Gricean maxims or principles” (p. 1), such as Levinson 2000) vs. relevance theorists (i.e. those who “refer to general cognitive principles such as the Principle of Optimal Relevance” (p. 1), such as Wilson & Sperber 2004); minimalism (“a classical, minimalist approach to the truth conditions of a sentence, and consequently […] a more powerful apparatus for pragmatic interpretation” (p. 2)) vs. contextualism (the assumption that context plays a much greater role in numerous aspects of semantic interpretation); and competing terminological proposals (especially with respect to “pragmatically steered propositional enrichment”). Some of these discussions are echoed in the literature reviews of the individual papers that follow (e.g. Liedtke discusses contextualism and implicature vs. explicature, with a review of experimental approaches to the question). “The development of conversational competence in children with Specific Language Impairment” (SLI), by Robert M. Kurtz and Ronnie B. Wilbur, shows that children with SLI produce significantly more violations of conversational rules than typically developing peers (with archival videotapes from a previous study in which preschool children interacted with adult examiners rated by two adult judges), particularly involving Gricean maxims of relation and quantity (respectively, “be relevant,” and “make your contribution as informative as required”). The authors acknowledge the limitation of a small number of subjects in both the target and control groups (4 each), and raise important questions about methodology. In “The impact of literal meaning on what-is-said,” Frank Liedtke tests 42 undergraduates on 8 items, and finds that speakers have intuitions regarding “the extent to which one would classify something uttered as something said” (p. 57); that is, “a level of utterance meaning which has a set of obligations for the utterer” (p. 59). “Discourse under control in ambiguous sentences,” by Vincenzo Moscati, reports on two experiments on the interaction of Italian modal ‘potere’ and sentential negation, and finds that “in the presence of logical ambiguity, children prefer the reading expressing impossibility. Even when this interpretation is not allowed in the adult grammar” (p. 74). Assuming that every assertion must be informative with regard to a salient “Question Under Discussion” (QUD), Husley et al. (2004) proposed a Question Answer Requirement (QAR). No effects were found from manipulations of the QUD here, leading Moscati to state that the interpretation of the interaction of modality and negation does not appear to be affected by the QAR. “Pragmatic children: How German children interpret sentences with and without the focus particle only,” by Anja Müller, Petra Schulz, and Barbara Höhle replicates, in German, an English study by Paterson et al. (2003), using the same set of pictures with six-year-olds, and confirms that both English and German-speaking children “did not seem to integrate the set of alternatives into their current discourse model when the set of alternatives was not introduced in the verbal context” (p. 97). A second experiment on children’s pragmatic ability to judge underinformative sentences, however, showed that both children and adults were affected (albeit to differing extents) by the informational complexity of a picture, suggesting that the results of the first experiment were due to the methodology employed, not due to a general principle of children's cognition. “Adult response uniformity distinguishes semantics from pragmatics: Implications for child language,” by Leah R. Paltiel-Gedalyovich, supports the assertion of its title by showing that children age 5 and older showed “uniform adultlike knowledge” (p. 101) of semantic, truth-conditional meanings (e.g. conjunction, disjunction) in a truth value judgment task, while non-truth-conditional semantic and pragmatic meanings which did not receive uniform judgments from adults (e.g. quantity implicatures associated with 'or' and 'but') were still not demonstrated by the age of 9 and a half years. In “Numerals and scalar implicatures,” Daniele Panizza and Gennaro Chierchia present results of two experiments (a questionnaire given to 48 Italian undergraduate students and a reading task measuring eye movement of 54 native Italian speakers) to argue that numerals embedded in upward-entailing contexts (which license entailments from subsets to supersets) are given an upper-bounded (“exactly”) reading more often than when embedded in minimally different downward entailing contexts (which display the opposite entailments), suggesting that the stronger interpretation is due to a scalar implicature (that is, a conversational implicature due to the observation of the maxim of quantity). “Meaning in the objects,” by Katharina J. Rohlfing, details an experiment manipulating mothers' speech to their young children (involving 17 American English-speaking and 17 German-speaking mother-child pairs, with children 20-26 months old), and offers strong statistical evidence that the nature of objects in the testing situation (particularly whether the objects are in canonical or noncanonical spatial relationships) influences linguistic as well as gestural behavior, with mothers' nonverbal behavior also affected by knowledge of their children's productive lexicon (as reported by a pre-test parent questionnaire). “Blocking modal enrichment (tatsächlich),” by Hans-Christian Schmitz, presents a series of experiments of undergraduates in Germany, showing that students can perform 'modal enrichment' of sentences such as “It's 5 past 3, but my watch is 5 minutes fast” (interpreting the non-literal message that it's actually 3 o'clock), but that the operation is blocked by the German term ' tatsächlich.' The author assumes that 'in fact' (the literal translation) will operate similarly in English. Petra B. Schumacher's “The hepatitis called…: Electrophysiological evidence for enriched composition” documents a particular event-related brain potential (ERP), a late positivity associated with increased processing demands of reference transfer (when a salient property associated with an individual is used to refer to that person, as in referring to a hepatitis patient as “the hepatitis”). After the ERP recordings, all 24 subjects completed a questionnaire rating the acceptability of such expressions. The questionnaire showed that reference transfer is marked in comparison to more direct referential expressions (some subjects volunteered comments about it being “impolite”), but comparing these self-assessments to the ERP data showed no consistent effect of conscious, overt attitudes on the underlying, online processing of such constructions. “The role of QUD and focus on the scalar implicature of ‘most,’” by Arjen Zondervan, manipulates focus by an explicit QUD to show that when story and target sentence are constant, more scalar implicatures are calculated when 'most' is in the focus (new information) part of the sentence. Two truth value judgment experiments were conducted (on separate subjects) to test whether the wording of the task (the first asking subjects to deem sentences 'true' or 'false,' the second asking for 'right' or 'wrong') mattered, but showed no significant difference in responses. The chapters are not numbered and will be referred to in the evaluation section by author(s) only. EVALUATION The studies included here are interesting and should encourage future empirical study of the semantics-pragmatics interface. Schumacher’s excellent demonstration of the disconnect between conscious evaluation and underlying processing should convince even the most traditional semanticists of the need for empirical testing and of the exciting potential for collaboration between psycholinguists and semanticists. Future discussions of the role of the QUD will not be able to ignore the evidence presented by Zondervan and Moscati, although it will be interesting to see how these are reconciled, given that Zondervan documents a QUD effect and Moscati the lack thereof (albeit with respect to different semantic features). Nonetheless, the volume was somewhat disappointing in a couple of respects. First, the topics under investigation are somewhat scattered, with noticeable gaps at the heart of the semantics-pragmatics distinction; nary a word about presupposition, speech acts, or discourse particles, and hardly any discussion of referring expressions, beyond Schumacher's investigation of “reference transfer.” While some chapters may be of interest only to those interested in the particular feature under investigation (e.g. Schmitz on modal enrichment), quite a few chapters raise methodological issues that will be relevant for anyone interested in the use of empirical data in the study of semantics and pragmatics. Not surprisingly, given the context of the workshop from which these papers were drawn, the languages investigated are overwhelmingly Germanic, with seven out of the ten chapters using German, English, and/or Dutch data. Two (Moscati and Panizza & Chierchia) use Italian, and one (Paltiel-Gedalyovich) uses Hebrew, but that is the extent of the diversity included. Although Liedtke in particular urges the crosslinguistic confirmation of previous studies, this volume does not move us very far in that direction. Since traditional approaches to semantics and pragmatics have not been explicitly experimental, it would not appear that there are clear disciplinary norms for such investigations as of yet. Some of the studies included here are strictly controlled, or at least acknowledge their methodological limitations, such as Schumacher, who gives (among other details) standard deviations from the mean age of her subjects (as well as the absolute range), sex, stipulates that they were all monolingual, right-handed, and reports normal or corrected-to-normal visual acuity (such details being common in psycholinguistic research). Other studies present much less detail, such as Zondervan, who only tells us that “35 participants were recruited by email.” Most of the contributions offer adequate statistical analysis of experimental results; this, however, is not consistent throughout the volume. Panizza & Chierchia present suggestive percentages (e.g. conditional sentences receive upper-bounded interpretations of the numeral 78% of the time in upward entailing environments and only 49% of the time in downward entailing environments), terming certain factors (and interactions of factors) as “significant” or not, but no statistical analysis is given, and it is unclear whether these labels are intended to denote statistical significance. In the case of Liedtke, the percentage of judges that deemed a proposition “said” vs. “intimated” is often quite close (e.g. 52.4% (22) vs. 45.4% (19)). It is unfortunate, then, that no statistical analysis was conducted, especially given that he had a sufficient number of judges to allow for strong statistical conclusions. Schmitz does relevant statistical tests, yet his discussion seems to make stronger claims than warranted by the experiments he conducted. While he shows that his subjects do routinely perform modal enrichment on sentences without 'tatsächlich,' and that they do not perform such enrichment when the lexical item is present, this does not necessarily show that ' tatsächlich' “does not have truth-conditional content; its only function is to block modal enrichment operations” (p. 197). As psycholinguists have repeatedly found, studying young children can be especially problematic. While half of the chapters included in this volume involve young children, the methods vary widely, and most of these chapters have implications for methodological considerations. Kurtz & Wilbur's finding that children with SLI show pragmatic deficits is hardly surprising, but this study is useful in that it points to limitations in the categorization scheme developed by Bishop & Adams (1989): the two trained raters disagreed on the categorization of the conversational violation thirty percent of the time. Moscati and Paltiel-Gedalyovich both elicit truth value and/or felicity judgments with varying stimuli (Moscati’s children saw a puppet show and heard a story, Paltiel-Gedalyovich’s subjects looked at pictures). Both Müller, Schulz, & Höhle, who employ a picture selection task, and Rohlfing, whose study involves children even though the study targets the behavior of the mother, find that nonlinguistic factors in the experimental situation (e.g. visual information in the pictures for the former, and objects in canonical or noncanonical spatial relationships for the latter) have an effect on linguistic judgments and/or behavior, with implications for all future experiments. As is common in edited volumes, the writing is quite uneven and in several cases noticeably non-native, with grammatical errors. Footnotes are used throughout, rather than end notes, and each chapter contains its own set of references. There is a common index for the volume, but it is very bare bones and not particularly useful. For example, I could not figure out why 'or' and 'only' merit entries, while spatial relations in general and 'on' and 'under' in particular do not (since Rohlfing does quite a bit with these). While Meibauer & Steinbach’s review of the field in the Introduction is certainly far from complete, it does provide adequate context for the work presented here, showing how the current studies contribute to ongoing debates and how they build on previously developed methodologies. All of the contributions are quite accessible to nonspecialists due to avoiding complex semantic representations and not assuming in-depth knowledge of particular theories or frameworks. At times, the struggle to maintain this level of accessibility becomes apparent, and a little more editorial work could have been done to avoid repeating definitions or to agree upon what background knowledge might be safely assumed for the intended audience. For example, the Introduction explicitly introduces, defines, and elaborates on the idea of scalar implicatures (p. 3), but then refers casually, with no explanation, to “pragmatic principles like the Q-Principle, the I-Principle, and the M-Principle” (p. 4). Similarly, the Kurtz & Wilbur chapter explicitly introduces Grice's maxims of conversation, even though the Introduction had previously assumed familiarity with these. In conclusion, although this volume does not fulfill my own personal wish list of topics I'd like to see covered, it does advance us in that direction. As the volume's editors put it, although “the resulting picture [of this collection] is by no ways a coherent one, this volume […] contributes findings and arguments that will foster future discussions” (p. 11). REFERENCES Bishop, D. & Adams, C. 1989. Conversational characteristics of children with semantic- pragmatic disorder, II: What features lead to a judgment of inappropriacy? The British Journal of Disorders of Communication 24: 241-263. Husley, S., Hacquard, V., Fox, D., & Gualmini, A. 2004. The question-answer requirement and scope assignment. In Plato’s Problem: Papers on Language Acquisition, A. Csirmaz, A. Gualmini & A. Nevins, 71-90. Cambridge, MA: MITWPL. Levinson, S.C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Paterson, K., Liversedge, S., Rowland, C., & Filik, R. 2003. Children’s comprehension of sentences with focus particles. Cognition 89: 263-294. Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. 2004. Relevance theory. In The Handbook of Pragmatics, L.R. Horn & G. Ward (eds.), 607-632. Oxford: Blackwell. ABOUT THE REVIEWER Mary Shapiro is a Professor of Linguistics at Truman State University in Kirksville, MO where she teaches a course on “Semantics & Pragmatics” as well as one on “Language & the Mind.” Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 10-Oct-2011       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.