Daphna Heller is (Ph.D. Rutgers University, 2005) is Associate Professor of Linguistics. Her research examines issues in semantics and pragmatics from the perspective of cognitive science; specifically, how language is produced and interpreted in real time, within the rich context of a conversation. She directs the Toronto Language Processing Lab (TLPL), which conducts interactive conversational studies, some using eye-tracking. Dr. Heller has collaborated with linguists, psychologists and computer scientists, and her work has been published in venues across a broad range of fields, including Linguistics and Philosophy, Journal of Semantics, Cognition and Cognitive Science.
What I'm working on: Sources of Information and Linguistic Meaning: From Typology to Cognition
Participating in conversation has been widely argued to depend on the ability to track what information is already shared between the conversational partners. While the notion of ‘common ground’ has been a basic concept in multiple fields, my recent research has challenged the utility of a common ground representation, moving instead to the Multiple-Perspectives Theory, in which each partner holds a separate representation of the self and other. By shifting the focus away from the symmetry dictated by common ground, the Multiple-Perspectives Theory opens up possibilities for exploring new relationships between grammatical elements and the knowledge of conversational partners. The current project explores one such asymmetry – sources of information – asking how they are used, tracked, and encoded in language. One important linguistic construction in this context is evidential markers: I will investigate how their pragmatic use relates to asymmetries in perspective between the conversational partners.