Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics

This handbook is the first to explore the growing field of experimental semantics and pragmatics. In the past 20 years, experimental data has become a major source of evidence for building theories of language meaning and use, encompassing a wide range of topics and methods. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters in this volume offer an up-to-date account of research in the field spanning 31 different topics, including scalar implicatures, presuppositions, counterfactuals, quantification, metaphor, prosody, and politeness, as well as exploring how and why a particular experimental method is suitable for addressing a given theoretical debate. The volume's forward-looking approach also seeks to actively identify questions and methods that could be fruitfully combined in future experimental research. Written in a clear and accessible style, this handbook will appeal to students and scholars from advanced undergraduate level upwards in a range of fields, including semantics and pragmatics, philosophy of language, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, cognitive science, and neuroscience.

Chris Cummins is a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. He previously worked at Bielefeld University, having received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. His research interests include the pragmatic interpretation of quantity expressions, and how this bears upon reasoning and decision-making; he has also published on the topics of presupposition, speech acts and metaphor. He is the author of Constraints on Numerical Expressions (OUP 2015).
Napoleon Katsos is a Reader in Experimental Pragmatics at the University of Cambridge. He was among the first generation of PhD researchers to be trained in experimental pragmatics and took part in related networks, such as Euro-XPrag, XPrag-UK, and XPrag-De. He is interested in how we learn, process, and use the meaning of words and sentences, with emphasis on quantification and implicature. He draws relevant evidence from linguistic theory and experimental psychology, including sentence processing and typical or atypical language acquisition by monolingual or bilingual children.

1: Chris Cummins and Napoleon Katsos: Introduction 2: Dimitrios Skordos and David Barner: Language comprehension, inference, and alternatives 3: Judith Degen and Michael K. Tanenhaus: Constraint-based pragmatic processing 4: Richard Breheny: Scalar implicatures 5: Sherry Yong Chen and E. Matthew Husband: Event (de)composition 6: Florian Schwarz: Presuppositions, projection, and accommodation 7: Myrto Grigoroglou and Anna Papafragou: Spatial terms 8: Heather Ferguson: Counterfactuals 9: Kristen Syrett: Distributivity 10: Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga: Genericity 11: Rick Nouwen, Stavroula Alexandropoulou, and Yaron McNabb: Modified numerals 12: Ye Tian and Richard Breheny: Negation 13: Lyn Tieu and Jacopo Romoli: Plurality 14: Adrian Brasoveanu and Jakub Dotläil: Quantification 15: Patricia J. Brooks and Olga Parshina: Quantifier spreading 16: Stephanie Solt: Adjective meaning and scales 17: Nicola Spotorno and Ira Noveck: Ironic utterances 18: Nausicaa Pouscoulous and Giulio Dulcinati: Metaphor 19: Petra B. Schumacher: Metonymy 20: Sam Alxatib and Uli Sauerland: Vagueness 21: Marie Juanchich, Miroslav Sirota, and Jean-François Bonnefon: Verbal uncertainty 22: Hugh Rabagliati and Mahesh Srinivasan: Word senses 23: Kristen Syrett: Antecedent-contained deletion 24: Edgar Onea: Exhaustivity in it-clefts 25: Christina S. Kim: Focus 26: Ming Xiang: Negative Polarity Items 27: Hannah Rohde: Pronouns 28: Catherine Davies and Jennifer E. Arnold: Reference and informativeness 29: Judith Tonhauser: Prosody and meaning 30: Thomas Holtgraves: Politeness 31: Paula Rubio Fernández: Theory of Mind 32: J. P. de Ruiter: Turn-taking