Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

A hallmark of linguistic communication is that what is said often underdetermines what is intended by a given utterance. Consider hearing the following expressions: `The author began the book' (indeterminate sentence) or `My lawyer is a shark' (metaphor). In these two instances, the hearer needs to go beyond the literal utterance to arrive at the meaning intended by the speaker. For instance, in the indeterminate sentence above, although it is not clear what the author began doing with the book, the sentence seems to license several plausible interpretations such as `The author began writing/reading the book'. And similarly, we know that lawyers cannot literally be sharks, and that the utterance may convey the Idea of aggressiveness. But the question is: Where does the information that licenses these sorts of interpretations come from? And, similarly, what are the cognitive, linguistic, and neurological mechanisms underlying this capacity? In one approach, interpreting these expressions might require calculating the speaker's "intention" by first engaging in early, compositional/literal meaning computations, before relying on pragmatic, inferential processes. An alternative view is that the interpretation of these so-called non-literal expressions relies, _by necessity_, on lexical-semantic processes, or on direct access to encyclopedic knowledge that gives rise to an interpretation of the speaker's intentions, even bypassing a literal/compositional meaning. The proposal is part of a long-term research program investigating the nature of semantic composition and sentence interpretation by exploring the cognitive, linguistic, and neurological underpinnings of metaphors, indeterminate sentences, and other expressions deemed `non-decompositional'. The proposed experiments will focus on the comprehension of sentences in context and in isolation, measuring the relative contribution of context to (a) the linguistic process of semantic analysis (i.e., whether or not context influences the process of attaining a purely denotative, compositional representation); and (b) the time-course of discourse context influences on sentence interpretation--the processes that by hypothesis enable an enriched interpretation of the sentence towards its intended meaning. The studies will employ diverse methods and experimental techniques, including eye-tracking, visual world, cross-modal priming, and fMRI, advancing with new methods and variables recent studies conducted in my lab (e.g., de Almeida, 2004, 2018a, 2018b; de Almeida de Almeida de Almeida, Riven, Manouilidou, Lungu, Dwivedi, Jarema, de Almeida, Manouilidou, Riven, de Almeida Patalas Ashby, Roncero, de Almeida, Roncero Roncero, de Almeida, Martin, & de Caro, 2016; de Almeida, Di Nardo, Antal, & von Grunau, 2019).