When communicating, speakers make plenty of choices. More precisely, each individual utterance represents a path in an infinite labyrinth of possibilities: "half-full" or "half-empty", "some" or "not all", a loud "GOOD MORNING!", a silent "good morning" or something in between? Each of these choices has consequences on how the hearer understands (or misunderstands) an utterance. The research theme Speaker‘s Choice and Language Use investigates the paths on which people navigate through the highly complex labyrinth of language. On the one hand, we are interested in how a speaker chooses a path, and on the other hand, how the hearer interprets the choice of this path.

A speaker's choice is almost never by chance, but rather to express a certain aspect of meaning. Therefore, the topic is approached from the perspective of semantics and pragmatics, also taking into consideration syntactic, cognitive and other constraints. We strive for a close integration of experimental and theoretical work. On this basis we develop formal models of decision processes and the interfaces to syntax and semantics. The comparison of different theoretical approaches – in particular grammatical, game theoretic and algorithmic models – is a central goal. We are also particularly interested in the influence of speaker knowledge on the choices and compare, for example, children and adults.

Projects that contribute to the research theme:

• the DFG project Experimental Game Theory and Scalar Implicatures. Investigating variation in context and scale type (SIGames 2).
• the DFG project Propositional and Non-at-issue Content in Text Generation: Exploring the QUD–Perspective (QUD Gen)
• the CRC project Modeling meaning-driven register variation (CRC 1412-Register A05)
• the DFG project Logic across languages: expressing and interpreting connectives cross-linguistically (CrossConn)
• the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN)

Completed projects that contributed to the research theme:

• the DFG projects Lexical Inference vs. Scalar Implicature (LISI) and Modelling the Use of Quantifiers in Typical and Atypical Speakers Probabilistically (MUQTASP) in the framework of the SPP 1727 XPrag.de
• the DFG project Attenuating polarity elements from the scalar range (DegAtt)