My research uses the study of social cognition and joint attention to examine the structure and organization of discourse and narrative in a variety of media. Social cognition is crucial to language use and acquisition. Not only is language an inherently social and cultural construction, the relative ease with which people engage in face-to-face conversation, as opposed to delivering speeches or writing essays, suggests that humans or language, or both, are optimized for thinking interactively. Joint attention is a fundamental aspect of social cognition: the ability to share attention to some object with another person and mutually recognize that the attention is shared. This ability appears to be a crucial ingredient in acquiring language.
Researchers who study joint attention frequently apply the framework to cases such as autism and early childhood, in which people's ability to understand themselves as part of these scenes is not fully developed. The study of literature, on the other hand, is continually engaged with circumstances where joint attention is relevant, highly developed, and complex. In my research, linguistics and cognitive science provide the basis for specific and particularizing claims about literature, its production, and its reception, while literary texts and the discourses surrounding them are used to support broader theoretical work about language and the mind.
More details on these to be posted soon:
- Literary joint attention
- Egocentric biases, narrative misdirection, and the Cooperative Principle
- Grammatical and rhetorical consequences of the entrenchment of conceptual structures
- Readers, speakers and irony
