Upcoming Events

27 March 2026: Camilla Sætehaug

The Pragmatics of Enjambment

Enjambment, the continuation of a syntactic unit across a poetic line break, is a common poetic device whose effects on interpretation have received limited attention from a cognitive pragmatic perspective. This thesis investigates enjambment theoretically and experimentally within a relevance-theoretic framework. It explores how line breaks that disrupt syntactic and semantic completion may function as ostensive pragmatic cues that attract attention and guide readers’ inferential processing.

Drawing on literary critical descriptions of enjambment as producing seemingly contradictory effects such as suspense or tension as well as movement or flow, the thesis argues that such effects can be understood as fluctuations in processing effort during poetic reading. Building on previous relevance-theoretic accounts of literary interpretation and poetic effects, it develops an empirically informed approach to enjambment. The theoretical account is illustrated through a relevance-theoretic close reading of Lucille Clifton’s poem daughters and tested experimentally using a self-paced reading task comparing total reading times for enjambed and non-enjambed poetic lines. The results show that enjambed lines are associated with a small but statistically significant increase in total reading time, consistent with increased overall processing effort.

This thesis proposes that enjambment attracts attention and modulates inferential processing by prompting readers to resolve a tension between pausing at the end of a poetic line and continuing forward to complete the syntactic or semantic structure before integrating meaning across the line break.

24 April 2026: Fabrizio Gallai, & Chara Vlachaki

Affective Effects as Key Theoretical Tools for Prosodic-Pragmatic Analysis

This seminar explores the theoretical and analytical potential of affective effects—as developed in Wharton & de Saussure’s Pragmatics and Emotion (2023)—as central tools for prosodic-pragmatic research. Challenging the long-standing division between “reason” and “emotion” in semantics and pragmatics, Wharton & de Saussure argue that emotional meaning is not peripheral, but constitutive of human communication. Their model integrates affective science with Relevance Theory, proposing that utterance interpretation relies not only on conceptual inferences, but also on patterns of affective activation that guide attention, shape contextual selection, and constrain inferential routes in systematic, measurable ways.

Building on this framework, the seminar shows how primary and secondary affective effects—anticipatory, transfer-based, and inferentially generated—provide new explanatory leverage for multimodal analysis. Prosodic, facial, and gestural cues operate as “natural codes” that trigger affective effects in real time, promoting fast, subcortical evaluation pathways while interacting with slower, propositional reasoning. This dual-route perspective helps to explain why certain prosodic contours, voice qualities, or facial configurations exert powerful pragmatic force even when their contribution is ineffable or impossible to paraphrase. The presenters will demonstrate how these affective mechanisms can be operationalised in multimodal transcription and in empirical studies of speech, drawing attention to the communicative work accomplished by cloud-like, non-propositional content.

The seminar will also present original data on simultaneous interpreting, drawing on a corpus on EU Parliament speeches, involving seven languages. Wharton & de Saussure’s “affective machinery” offers a predictive model of how emotion-laden source speech influences interpreter processing, output patterns, and audience uptake. The presenters will show how affective effects—activated through source-speech prosody, lexical choices, or embodied displays—shape interpreters’ anticipatory processing, segmentation decisions, mitigation or intensification strategies, and multimodal alignment with the speaker. Particular attention will be paid to the systematicity of these effects and to the extent to which they can be empirically traced through acoustic measures. Together, these threads argue for an expanded, affect-aware pragmatics which treats emotional meaning not as an optional add-on, but as a fundamental dimension of relevance. Through theoretical framing and data-driven illustration, the seminar positions affective effects as indispensable tools for the next generation of prosodic-pragmatic and multimodal research.

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