Pragmatic Reasoning with (Non-)visual Alternatives

Project Participants

Nadine Bade

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Dr. Nadine Bade
(Principal Investigator)

University of Potsdam
nadine.bade@uni-potsdam.de

Nadine Bade’s research focuses on experimental investigations of phenomena at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Her work addresses the question how different contextual and structural factors influence pragmatic inferences and reasoning. Her research mostly uses methods from psychology to study pragmatic meaning in a variety of languages, including but not limited to mouse- and eye-tracking, reaction time as well as rating studies. Before starting her project “Pragmatic reasoning with (non-)visual alternatives” in ViCom she was working in different interdisciplinary projects at the University of Potsdam, École Normale Supérierure in Paris and the University of Tübingen. 

Selected publications

  • Bade, Nadine, et al. “Alternatives and attention in language and reasoning: A reply to Mascarenhas & Picat 2019.” Semantics and Pragmatics 15.2 (2022).
  • Bade, Nadine, and Florian Schwarz. “New data on the competition between definites and indefinites.” Experiments in Linguistic Meaning 1 (2021): 15-26.
  • Bade, Nadine. “On the scope and nature of Maximise Presupposition.” Language and Linguistics Compass 15.6 (2021): e12416.
  • Bade, Nadine, and Agata Renans. “A cross-linguistic view on the obligatory insertion of additive particles—Maximize Presupposition vs. Obligatory Implicatures.” Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 6.1 (2021).
  • Bade, Nadine, and Konstantin Sachs. “EXH passes on alternatives: A comment on Fox and Spector (2018).” Natural Language Semantics 27.1 (2019): 19-45.

Project Description

The project investigates the role of visual alternatives in pragmatic reasoning. Specifically, it looks at the interaction of visual with non-visual (verbal) alternatives in the derivation of three inference types – presuppositional and conversational implicatures as well as presuppositions – using experimental methods. A first theoretical goal of the project is to inform and build multi-modal models of how pragmatic strengthening proceeds incorporating the role of visual material. A second theoretical goal is to inform theories of presupposition triggering by investigating the role of visual salience in triggering processes. An overarching methodological goal is to compare different visual paradigms in their impact on experimental investigations in pragmatics using visual stimuli.