VASTRUD

I was the PI of a project called VASTRUD (Variation in the structuring of discourse: the grammar of perspective, clause typing and common ground management) for the 2019-2021 period. It is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MiCIU) and the Spanish Research Agency (AEI), with the support of the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER, EU), with reference PGC2018-096870-B-I00. Its team members are Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria and Nerea Madariaga (UPV/EHU), and it also includes Maia Duguine, Ricardo Etxepare and Aritz Irurtzun (IKER-CNRS) as collaborators, and Katherine Fraser, Aitor Lizardi and Laura Vela-Plo as PhD Students. Additionally, we have been granted a 4-year PhD fellowship to hire a student.

The purpose of VASTRUD is to explore the interface between grammar and discourse across three axes (cross-linguistic variation, diachronic change, and neuro-diversity). Discourse is the study ground of semantics viewed as the discipline that is concerned with how the utterances of interlocutors in conversation affect the body of shared commitments and beliefs.

In parallel, through the analysis of an increasing number of under-represented languages and varieties, some syntacticians have proposed to incorporate not only information structure notions and sentential force specifications in the architecture of grammar, but also information regarding the epistemic state of the agents in conversation, the interpretive effect of prosody or instructions as encoded in speech acts. Along with this, population with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is characterized by having difficulties with pragmatics. However, not much is known about whether/how this impairment is linked to grammar. All this makes the syntax-discourse interface a critical domain to understand how languages vary (in the three axes).

The overarching goal of this project is to (i) gain a better understanding of (the nature of) the elements that play a role in structuring discourse, and (ii) to study how languages vary in their grammatical coding of discourse-related notions. Our study ground is thus not just the clause but rather more complex meaning units that can receive formal treatment, such as complex sentences and even larger portions of discourse, where notions such as rhetorical relations, the (old-new) status of the information that is conveyed, and the perspective of the discourse participants (speaker and addressee) are not only relevant, but also obey restrictions that can be scrutinized and modeled.