Empirical Evidence for Embodied Semantics

Abstract

This paper addresses the question whether and under which conditions hearers take into account the perspective of the speaker, and vice versa. Distinguishing between speaker meaning and hearer meaning, empirical evidence from computational modeling, psycholinguistic experimentation and corpus research is presented which suggests that literal sentence meanings result from the hearer’s failure to calculate the speaker meaning. Similarly, non recoverable forms may result from the speaker’s failure to calculate the hearer meaning.