This month a new article entitled “Pragmatics: Theory and Experiment Growing Together” by Uli Sauerland and Petra Schumacher on the current state-of-the-art in Experimental Pragmatics was published in Linguistische Berichte.
Abstract:
Pragmatics is already an established subfield of linguistics and the Gricean distinction between literal and speaker’s meaning is one of the foundations of modern linguistic theory. But progress in pragmatics has been slow compared to other subfields of linguistics over the last four decades. We argue that one recent trend, namely Experimental Pragmatics, promises to overcome the stagnant state of pragmatic theory. We present both the three main developments that come together in Experimental Pragmatics (Gricean pragmatics, precise models, and formal experiments). We then present recent results that exemplify the promise of Experimental Pragmatics in two core domains: scalar implicatures and metonymy.