ViCom offers a start-up funding programme to support outstanding post-doctoral researchers for a period of 6 months. The grantee will hold the title of “ViCom Junior Fellow” and will join an individual ViCom project to prepare their own research proposal for ViCom’s second funding period in order to apply for their own independent funding.
The Principal Investigator of the ViCom project the Fellow joins will act as their supervisor. In addition to regular mentoring by the supervisor, our fellows receive other support, including research training opportunities in areas such as methodology and data evaluation, resources for pilot experiments, workspace and structured career development. Fellows are also encouraged to collaborate with ViCom experts and internationally invited specialists in visual communication.
Dr. Vinicius Macuch Silva
(ViCom Junior Fellow)
Goethe University Frankfurt
vini.macuch@gmail.com
Vinicius Macuch Silva is interested in how people use language to create meaning in communication, both when interacting with one another and when producing and interpreting language in various other settings. In his research he primarily uses quantitative empirical methods, including controlled experimentation as well as computational and corpus analysis, to investigate issues related to pragmatic inferencing, strategic communication, argumentation and stance-taking, as well as expressive and affective meaning.
Selected publications
- Macuch-Silva, V., Lorson, A., Franke, M., Cummins, C., & Winter, B. (2024). Strategic use of English quantifiers in the reporting of quantitative information. Discourse Processes. https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2024.2413311
- Lorson, A., Macuch-Silva, V., Hart, C., & Winter, B. (2024). Gesture size affects numerical estimates in quantifier comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001372
- Macuch-Silva, V., & Franke, M. (2021). Pragmatic Prediction in the Processing of Referring Expressions Containing Scalar Quantifiers. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.662050
- Macuch-Silva, V., Holler, J., Özyürek, A., & Roberts, S. (2020). Multimodality and the origin of a novel communication system in face-to-face interaction. Royal Society Open Science. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.182056
- Jamieson, E, & Macuch-Silva, V. (joint first authors, to appear). Psycholinguistic processing tasks and the study of question bias. In Benz, A., Krifka, M., Trinh, T. and Yatushiro, K. (eds.) Biased Questions: Experimental Results and Theoretical Modelling.
Project Description
When using language, people often rely on linguistic expressions like (1)-(3) below to mark their stance on the truth or validity of what they are communicating.
(1) “It was a really good party”
(2) “It was actually a good party”
(3) “It was a good party, I think”
While plenty of research has looked at the meaning and usage of these so-called markers of epistemic stance, including how they vary cross-linguistically and how they interact with prosodic features of the signal, little research has looked at how their realization co-occurs and interacts with visual behavior such as manual and facial gestures and body posture.
This project aims to investigate the multimodal marking of epistemic stance, focusing on the integration between verbal (i.e. lexical, syntactic, etc.) and visual (i.e. manual, facial, etc.) cues and on their combined meaning contributions in context. In particular, it offers a contrastive analysis of epistemic stance-marking in German and Portuguese, languages from families that are known to employ different types of verbal devices in the marking of epistemic stance (see de Haan, 2006; Nuyts, 2001; and Prieto & Roseano, 2021 for detailed discussions). Ultimately, it contributes to the larger question of whether there is a functional trade-off between the marking of epistemic stance via visual and verbal means, as has been argued to be the case for prosody and morphosyntactic/ lexical marking (Prieto & Roseano, 2021), by investigating both language-internal and cross-linguistic patterns of vocal-visual epistemic stance-marking. The project is divided into two stages:
Stage 1: Multimodal production of markers of epistemic stance. In this stage, the goal is to document the visual strategies that German and Portuguese speakers use to mark speaker commitment. Empirically, this stage of the investigation relies on an experimental task originally used to elicit verbal markers of epistemic stance (Prieto and Roseano, 2021), as in (1) to (3) above.
Stage 2: Interpretation of multimodal cues to epistemic stance. In this stage, the goal is to build on the data and insights gained in the first stage of the project and to test hypotheses concerning the interpretation of German and Portuguese utterances containing both visual and verbal cues to epistemic stance. Empirically, the plan is to use rating tasks to assess the impact of multimodal epistemic cues on perceived speaker uncertainty. In particular, the investigation will focus on the derivation of non-at-issue meanings associated with the relevant epistemic markers.
Ultimately, the project has the potential to provide a comprehensive understanding of the usage of linguistic markers of epistemic stance by combining analyses of multimodal linguistic behavior which are not only theoretically-informed and empirically-grounded but which also tap into both language production and comprehension. By comparing languages that employ different types of verbal epistemic markers, the project not only contrasts formally distinct epistemic devices but it also taps into the question of whether there is a compensatory relationship between different formal means of marking of epistemic stance.