Experimental Pragmatics

Abstract

An important distinction in the investigation of meaning is that between semantics and pragmatics. One way to characterize this distinction is as the meaning associated with words and morphemes and how they are combined, on the one hand, with additional information arising from implicit or explicit reasoning on the part of the hearer on speaker’s communicative intentions, on the other. Experimental pragmatics is the investigation of the pragmatic components of meaning through psycholinguistic methods. The field has its roots in theoretical and experimental investigations of language, some of which had paid extensive attention to the role of contextual information in a variety of linguistic phenomena. It is only in the last twenty years, however, that the field of experimental pragmatic has really taken shape. In the early 21st century, there has been an explosion of experimental investigations, starting on implicatures in particular, and then extending to all sorts of pragmatic phenomena. Experimental pragmatics is now a dynamic area of research, bringing together theoretical, experimental, and computational linguists, with dedicated conferences, journals, and edited collections. The scope of work in this field covers all aspects of meaning related to pragmatics and its interfaces, bringing experimental evidence to their theoretical analyses, and investigating their processing and acquisition. More specifically, there are three main strands of research within experimental pragmatics. The first regards the investigation of the different aspects of meaning and the proper carving of the space among them, as well as the proper division between semantics and pragmatics. The second related strand has to do more specifically with testing experimentally diverging, and often fine-grained, predictions of different theoretical models. The third regards more the time course and processing of pragmatic aspects of meaning, as well as their acquisition from infancy to adulthood. This article lists a selection of references to articles, book chapters, and edited collections that have contributed to making the field of experimental pragmatics what it is today. The article is organized following the first strand above, with a separate section for each of the main different aspects of meaning, and a last one on other directions and topics. The other two strands, the way experimental work in pragmatics has brought progress in testing fine-grained theoretical predictions and the investigation of processing and acquisition of pragmatic aspects of meaning, are interspersed within the different sections. The article also contains sections dedicated to edited collections and journals relevant to the field.