Socially-relevant Pragmatic Inference

I’m interested in the ways speakers combine information from multiple sources to arrive at a coherent interpretation of utterances they read and hear. In particular, I investigate how their background beliefs about the structure of events affects language comprehension. I additionally ask how speakers factor in listener’s background beliefs in deciding how to describe events. Finally, I look at how communicative goals that go beyond pure information transfer shape human communication and inferences we draw about each other.

I am a PhD student in Project C4 of the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 1718 at the University of Tübingen, where I investigate the development of irony comprehension in children. I conduct experimental research with young German-speaking children to explore how theory of mind, common ground, and cognitive abilities contribute to their understanding of irony. Building on my background in multilingualism, I am broadly interested in language acquisition, particularly bilingual development and its role in shaping pragmatic skills.

I am a PhD student in Project C4 of the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 1718 at the University of Tübingen. My research focuses on how language is used in social interaction and on the cognitive mechanisms, such as theory of mind and common ground tracking, that support pragmatic language use and its development. I aim to bridge human experimental research, Bayesian cognitive models, and large language models to better understand how these abilities emerge and operate in both humans and artificial systems. I am currently focusing on modeling the development of irony comprehension as a testbed for investigating these processes.

My research interests lie in formal and experimental semantics and pragmatics, with a focus on how meaning is derived through pragmatic inference. I am particularly interested in presuppositions, implicatures, and the role of alternatives in shaping interpretation. In my work, I combine formal approaches with experimental methods to investigate how listeners arrive at enriched meanings and how factors such as background beliefs, context, and available alternatives influence this process. My earlier work on modality focused on how the strength of modal meanings arises from the interaction of contextually determined scales and pragmatic factors. More recently, I have also become interested in how such interpretive processes can be captured using computational modelling.

Elvan is lab manager and research assistant at the lab. She studies English Linguistics, with research interests in various disciplines in the linguistic field.

Yingjie is a research assistant at the lab, where he works on experimental design, data processing, and data analysis for ongoing research involving linguistic and behavioral data. He studies Computational Linguistics, with research interests in causality, semantic transparency, and morphological productivity in language.