Thesis supervisor: Anna Babarczy
Location of studies (in Hungarian): BME Kognitív Tudományi Tanszék Abbreviation of location of studies: BME
Description of the research topic:
Children’s pragmatic competence develops relatively slowly. Previous research and experimental results revea that young children’s interpretation of an utterance tends to deviate from an adult’s interpretation in contexts where pragmatics appears to override semantic meaning in the adult interpretation. This phenomenon can be observed in a wide variety of contexts such as scalar implicatures, metaphors and irony. Our project explores this phenomenon further attempting to provide a precise description of the differences in interpretation, characterise the process of development over time and compare our results to the predictions of theoretical models.
Noveck, I & D Sperber (eds), Experimental Pragmatics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Ashley Fidler & Anna Babarczy, Expanding Locative Case Marking beyond Spatial Contexts in Child Hungarian. Proceedings of the Boston University Conference on Language Development, 2008.
Required language skills: english Number of students who can be accepted: 1