What do experiments add to the field of pragmatics?

Ira Noveck
(Institut des Sciences Cognitives - Marc Jeannerod, Lyon, France)

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Paul Grice's seminal proposal placed intentions at the center of utterance understanding and laid the groundwork for a theory in which an addressee arrives at a speaker’s meaning (what the speaker intended to communicate by uttering a sentence) while encoding sentence meaning (the properties of a sentence assigned to it by the grammar). His armchair approach to pragmatics also provided researchers of a different stripe -- experimentalists -- with a framework to investigate pragmatic processes constructively, viz. by treating (mostly) addressees as naive participants. In this talk, I will show how Gricean analyses have led to experiments that provide the literature with original discoveries and reliable findings. Studies to be discussed include developmental and adult behavioral experiments as well as those using the tools of neuroscience. Among the topics I aim to cover are scalar implicature, irony and conventional implicature. I will describe how Gricean approaches along with alternative accounts collectively play an important role in experimental research because they provide a forum in which theoretical approaches can be compared. That is, experiments encourage researchers to agree on the contours and contrasts in a phenomenon and to make specific theory-driven predictions that can then be tested. Experimental work thus represents an opportunity for pragmatists to better delimit the field through generally accepted methods and objectives.