Discourse Particles and Cognition
The research group “Discourse particles and cognition” (DPKog) at Heidelberg University’s Centre for Iberoamerica focuses on the experimental study of discourse particles – linguistic expressions such as German daher, trotzdem, English even or Spanish incluso, sin embargo – to determine how they affect information processing. Discourse particles are linguistic devices that constrain inferential processes in language comprehension and guide the hearer to what the speaker intends to communicate (Blakemore 1987, 2002, amongst others). They do so because of their fundamentally procedural meaning and depending on their specific semantic, morphosyntactic and pragmatic properties (Portolés 2001). The research of the group DPKog currently concentrates on two types of discourse particles: focus operators, on the one hand, which act within an utterance guiding the hearer’s attention to the elements that a speaker seeks to highlight; and connectives, on the other hand, which link two discourse segments semantically and pragmatically, and lead to inferences derived from the connected segments as a whole.
Research area "Connectives"
The work of the research group DPKog in this field focuses on the processing of causal, adversative and concessive relations. Our research studies the effects that connectives have on the processing of information in different languages, depending on the linguistic features of discourse and on the characteristics of different participant groups.
Read more...Research area "Focus Operators"
The research group DPKog resorts to reading experiments and to the Visual World Paradigm (VWP), as well as to comprehension tests, to analyze how additive scalar focus operators condition information processing in different experimental conditions and in several languages.
Read more...Projects associated with this group
Discourse, Cognition and Linguistic Markers: Empirical Studies on Text Processing with Eye Tracking Technology
The eye tracking technology is used to prove the hypothesis that discourse markers are linguistic elements which guide the processing of information and reduce the cognitive effort during that process. To do so we collect data about the reading behavior under controlled conditions while participants read texts of different typologies in L1 and L2.
Read more...The construction of multimodal discourse of poverty in the Colombian digital media
This bi-national research project aims to incorporate the analytical potential of experimental research methodologies in the area of pragmatics to the study of multimodal discourse of poverty and welfare in the Colombian digital media.
Read more...The focus sensitive element "sogar"
In order to guide the inferential processes in communication, languages use different mechanisms. Focus particles are one of these mechanisms because of their mainly procedural meaning focalizing the hearer's attention and guiding him to certain constituents (Blakemore 2002). Furthermore, focus sensitive elements relate the focus and its alternatives in a certain way. Scalar particles like German "sogar" do so in establishing a relation of likelihood presenting the focused element as the least expected element (König 1991).
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