Crosslinguistic Pragmatics Research Group

This research group (led by Lisa Matthewson and Hotze Rullmann) investigates pragmatic phenomena in languages that have so far hardly been studied from this perspective. Until recently, formal theories of pragmatics have been based almost exclusively on English. Our goal is to extend the empirical scope of these theories to languages that are typologically and genetically very different, and to try to determine the nature and range of crosslinguistic variation in pragmatics.