Experimental pragmatics/semantics (review)

The ongoing expansion of interest in experimental semantics and pragmatics has seen its techniques being applied to increasingly many theoretical questions (Noveck & Sperber 2004, Sauerland & Yatsushiro 2009). The experimental approach promises to shed new light on long-contested issues that cannot be resolved by intuitions alone, concerning, for instance, the time-course of semantic and pragmatic processes. At the same time, this rapid expansion raises a number of risks: experiments can lose their connection with the theory, relevant work can be overlooked, and it may become increasingly difficult to obtain a clear picture of how the work in the field coheres (if at all).

Many of the opportunities, and some of the problems, are encapsulated in Jörg Meibauer and Markus Steinbach's edited volume. This collection, arising from the workshop of the same name at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) meeting in 2008, offers a diverse range of methodological approaches to a correspondingly broad selection of theoretical issues. As the editors themselves admit, 'the resulting picture is by no means a coherent one' (11). This lack of coherence is reflected in the lack of thematic organization, chapters being ordered alphabetically by author. Still, some themes appear more central to the enterprise than others—as one would expect from the editors' introduction, implicatures are well represented, but other interesting work in this collection relates more tenuously to their stated aims.

I should stress that, in my view, one of the particular strengths of this book is that the literature reviews are generally very satisfactory, considered, and interesting. Consequently, this volume stands as a valuable introduction to very many of the issues that are currently under investigation in the field. At the same time, the experimental work generally lacks some of the definitiveness and authority of the theoretical discussion. This arises for several reasons: some of the work presented here concerns preliminary or pilot studies, and some has been superseded by more recent publications by the same authors, a consequence of the inevitable lag between the workshop and the publication of a book. Moreover, the presentation of materials is not always as complete as might be hoped. It is of course true that I have concerns about many aspects of the methodologies employed here—I think everyone in the field has concerns about everyone's methodologies, including their own—but as the authors have no right of reply to my comments here, I propose to exercise a certain amount of discretion.

To address the alphabetical injustice meted out to ARJEN ZONDERVAN, I discuss the chapters in reverse order. His work, 'The role of QUD and focus on the scalar implicature of most', concerns the role of question under discussion (QUD) and focus, which are argued to influence the generation of scalar implicatures from terms such as most (+> 'not all') and or (+> '¬and'). The experimental results he discusses support an effect of this kind, which is perhaps most interesting for its implications for the experimental paradigm in general. Zondervan uses the truth value judgment task (TVJT) of Crain and Thornton (1998), with minor adaptations, and his results are shown to be sensitive to the precise wording of the task. He notes also that the TVJT may be capturing the acceptability of underinformativeness rather than the generation of scalar implicature, chiming in with the observations of Katsos and Bishop (2011).

Petra B. Schumacher's contribution, 'The hepatitis called ... : Electrophysiological evidence for enriched composition', discusses (to my relief) the phenomenon of coercion, and specifically reference transfer. Apparently nonreferring expressions can be reinterpreted in order to resolve discourse infelicities; thus, if a doctor is told that 'the hepatitis called', s/he will infer that the referent is the (salient) patient with hepatitis. Schumacher reports an event-related potentials (ERP) study revealing a late positivity for reference transfer versus control conditions, which she interprets as indicating additional processing costs in the critical trials. She discusses these results particularly with reference to the findings of Nieuwland...