Brian Buccola

Dr. Buccola’s research is in the area of formal and experimental semantics and pragmatics. His research focuses on how human language encodes meaning (semantics) and how context, beliefs, intentions, and other factors shape meaning when put to use (pragmatics). Humans routinely interpret language in ways that go beyond the literal semantic meaning of what they hear or see, a process called pragmatic enrichment. Many types of noise can affect this process, from background noise in the linguistic signal, to cognitive noise arising from memory limitations, to more abstract noise in the form of uncertainty about contextual factors and/or about the linguistic structure. Such noisy conditions may be studied directly in controlled experiments to better understand the linguistic divide between semantics and pragmatics, the nature of pragmatic enrichment, and its place within human (and perhaps even non-human) cognition more broadly. Recent research includes formal pragmatics of belief and relevance and the role of pragmatic enrichment in artificial language learning. REU students will learn contemporary formal pragmatic theory, experimental design using various behavioral methods (e.g., dual-task paradigms that manipulate memory load during language tasks), and basic data analysis and hypothesis testing.