SPP 1727: Focus and Thematic Role Assignment: A Comparison of Hungarian and German in Child Language Comprehension

The aim of this project is to investigate pragmatic inferences from information structure to thematic role assignment. The fact that information structure contributes to role disambiguation, in addition to syntactic and morphological cues (such as word order and case) is established in psycholinguistic and typological research. However, we know very little about listeners principles in mapping information structural categories, such as topic and focus, to particular arguments and their corresponding thematic roles. This project will collect empirical data with the goal of developing a precise pragmatic account of this process during language comprehension. Two theoretical positions will be compared: (a) Hearers use information structural preferences (e.g., topics are subjects and foci are objects) as defaults for thematic role assignment; (b) alternatively, information structural cues motivate pragmatic inferences about why the speaker uses canonical or non-canonical word orders.