More about Peech
Given this situation, why would the speaker choose one utterance over the other?
In other words, given the exact same piece of evidence in this situation, what decides the speaker’s choice of qualifying their statement by presenting the kind of confidence they have (e.g. “must”), as opposed to the sort of evidence available (e.g. “appear to”).
Apart from Peech
I'm interested in seeking different precise ways to quantify interlocutors' presumptions about their beliefs, and to predict which utterances or actions they may prefer. So far, Rational Speech Act (RSA)-based modeling has been a good friend and a fruitful formalism for exploring this topic. For example, me and my collaborators investigated a class of speaker-oriented items which signal prior-posterior differences during the interaction between the speaker and the listener. We were able to formulate their use under a Bayesian framework, in which the participants' knowledge states are represented probabilistically.
I'm looking forward to seeing how these models can be applied to epistemic adverbs which have the property of being intrinsically vague.
Additionally, I'm looking forward to using other behavioral-driven methods to approach the above question. Acceptability judgment tasks and self-paced reading tasks have been helping me to understand how others interpret sentences, i.e. how natural participants find different sentences and if they need more reading time to interpret some sentences. I have been thinking of designing other interactive approaches to understanding these intrinsically vague meanings, e.g. a combination of a betting game and picking balls out of urns, where participants have partial information but need to guess the rest of the information, when their game money is at stake. Mouse-driven picture verification tasks and eye-tracking tasks are both useful online measurements that I intend to learn more about in the near future.
My dissertation, On shi and de in Mandarin: clefts and beyond, supervised by Professor Dr. Daniel Hole and Professor Dr. Edgar Onea , provides a comprehensive comparison between the Mandarin shi...de cleft and bare-shi cleft through an analysis of their syntax and semantics, combining both theoretical and experimental perspectives.