Research Group: Language Production and Comprehension

Processes of Perspectivation during Language Production Soenke Ziesche Issue: The same mental representation for a state of affair can usually be expressed by a variety of different utterances, i.e. the mapping of this representation onto an utterance during natural language production is not definite. I call the processes which ensure a definite mapping "perspectivation".

In GrKK since 10/94 as Ph.D. student

Goal: Topics for the specification of perspectivaton: 1) In which way is the input structure being represented? 2) Which parameters determine the processes of perspectivation? 3) On which level within the mapping do these processes take place? 4) In which way do the processes of perspectivation occur? 5) In which way is the output structure being represented?

Methods: Psycholinguistics, Theoretical Linguistics, Computational Linguistics

Results (so far): It appears that due to perspectivation processes a mapping on the most felicitous utterance within the context is chosen, i.e. this choice presumably satisfies the intention the speaker associates with this utterance in an optimal way. I introduce a constraint-based and universally applicable model which describes the processes during language production, restricting the one-to-many mapping. Furthermore, I present a specification of the input and output structures as well as the contextual parameters. The most important processes of perspectivation are the computation of the informational status, the selection of predications, the linearization combined with the topic-comment structure, the focus-background structure, and the distribution of thematic roles. The model is grounded within the framework of cognitive science and focuses especially on the distribution of thematic roles as well as the graceful degradation of cooperation due to increasing resource constraints.