SFB 1718

Common Ground: Cognition – Grammar – Communication

01/10/2025 to 30/06/2029

Common ground is essential for successfully coordinating and carrying out any joint activity. At the level of large-scale social interaction, notions of CG are useful for understanding social dynamics, or public opinion formation. At the level of dyadic interaction, more fine-grained aspects of CG help explain nuanced phenomena relating to linguistically-oriented communication (LC), among other things. Despite its importance and centrality to many issues in many academic fields, the notion of common ground is highly elusive. This CRC is a multi-disciplinary effort, anchored in linguistics, towards a better understanding, wider applicability and empirical validation of notions of CG. Our research program is driven by the conviction that the explanatory potential behind the concept of CG can best be sharpened by a methodologically and conceptually diverse approach, but also that linguistics provides one of the clearest sources of data for a methodologically stringent investigation of CG, from which one can expand to neighboring disciplines. The proposed CRC is therefore structured around three core areas – Cognition, Grammar, and Communication – and brings together researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds, including theoretical and computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychology, rhetoric, literary studies, and biological anthropology. This joint endeavor will strengthen the role of linguistics as a potential link between different fields interested in language and linguistic communication.
Our long-term objective is to create an integrative model of CG, rooted in linguistic theory and tested against empirical data, which can serve as a unifying, explanatory conceptual framework for many disparate phenomena and puzzles about language, linguistic communication, and social interaction. Our long-term strategy is anchored in three foci: variation, unification, and testing. The challenges we are facing in our first funding phase are connected to variation across different domains: (A) the heterogeneity of information, its processing, and its representation within the CG, (B) the variety of linguistic devices that are able to update and manage the CG, and (C) the diverse communicative settings in which CG is established, as well as the epistemic relations of agents to the CG. These three areas are also highly intertwined. For the organization of research across areas A to C, as well as for the evaluation and integration of the areas’ results, two ‘cross-area’ platforms will be implemented. One platform will be concerned with the evaluation of theoretical concepts (RP1 – Theory) and the other with the evaluation of empirical methods (RP2 – Methodology).