Pragmatics: From Theory to Experiment and Back Again

This paper reviews some cases in which the collaboration of theoretical pragmaticians and psychologists of language has been most fruitful for all parties. Linguists have benefited from experimental data confirming the psychological validity of their observations and providing theory-critical evidence in cases beyond the reach of reflective intuition, while psychologists have benefited from having a wealth of linguistic phenomena to study as well as multiple theories furnished by semantics and pragmatics. Focusing on the much-discussed question of whether scalar implicature is a default inference, we aim to showcase the benefits of the experimental approach to pragmatics. Theoretically-motivated empirical investigations of pragmatic and semantic aspects of meaning are not novel. However, in recent years, interest in experimental pragmatics has intensified, leading to a flourishing literature in both linguistic and psychological journals, comprising overview and position articles (Novick & Reboul, in press; Sedivy, 2007; i.a), a series of meetings and conferences since 1998 and a dedicated website (www. This article does not offer a historical review of previous and current investigations, although such a review might provide a useful sidelight on the evolution of psychological and linguistic approaches to the study of meaning (see Sperber & Noveck, 2004). Rather, we present cases where interdisciplinary investigations between linguistics and psychology have proved mutually beneficial, whilst also highlighting problems to be overcome in this approach. The discussion of several topics could serve this aim. Studies on reference, speech act, metaphor, irony, and so-called figurative language comprehension have produced a wealth of psycholinguistic findings and informed models of human cognition. Many of these investigations were directly motivated by, and have fed back into, the linguistic theory of the phenomena. For instance, studies by Clark and colleagues on reference (see Clark & Bangerter, 2004 for a review) indicate that the coordination condition proposed by Grice (1989) and Lewis (1969) is insufficient, and that reference assignment requires more collaboration between speaker and hearer. This work has significance not only in a linguistic context but also to the psychology of language processing and Theory of Mind, the ability to take into account interlocutors " epistemic state (see Barr & Keysar, evidence against the pervasive notion in psycholinguistics that pragmatics is secondary to syntax and semantics (see chapters 2 and 3 in Noveck & Sperber, 2004 for an overview). Specifically, studies in metaphor comprehension have shown that apparently pragmatic processes of the type suggested by Grice (1989) and Searle …