The second workshop of the series 'What do humans know when they use language?' Delivered by Prof. Martina Wiltschko
Online
Abstract for Workshop 2
Most frameworks that assume aspects of language in use to be part of syntactic structure minimally include a representation of the interlocutors. The Interactional Spine Hypothesis is no exception. Interactional roles are assumed to be introduced in dedicated grounding phrases, where speaker and addressee are represented as the holders of their individual grounds (a placeholder for their epistemic states). If grammatical knowledge includes representations of the (epistemic states of) speaker and (what the speaker assumes to be the epistemic state of their) addressee, then it is predicted that utterances in interaction are sensitive to the identity of the speaker and addressee, and the relation between them. This in turn requires a methodological shift in that the well-formedness of utterances must be judged relative to a particular context that takes the identity of the interlocutors into consideration. Much current research focusses on the use of honorifics and other addressee-oriented formality strategies to empirically explore the nature of these representations.
In this workshop I explore this question from a novel angle, namely self-talk. That is, if the addressee role is part of the grammatical representation of i-language, then the question arises as to what happens in situations when people talk to themselves, i.e., when there is no addressee. I demonstrate that self-talk provides us with striking evidence for the grammatical representation of the (epistemic state of the) addressee role.
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Martina Wiltschko is an ICREA research Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Catalonia. She is a theoretical linguist, specializing in syntax and its interfaces. Working broadly within the generative tradition, she aims to bridge the gap to other traditions, including functionalist, cognitivist, and interactionalist approaches towards language. The big questions she pursues include the following: What is the relation between sound, meaning, and category? What is the relation between language, thought, and communication? What drives human interaction? And how does knowledge of language fit into cognition?