Communication verbs as indicators of situational context

When we encounter verbs such as chat or tell, we tend to think of a private communication, such as a meeting with family members or friends, rather than a public speech or a professional or institutional context. The phenomenon that the use of a linguistic expression can signal or evoke certain situational contexts is captured by the term indexicality. In a usage-based language model, it would be assumed that the indexicality of linguistic expressions results from their frequency of occurrence in particular situational contexts, i.e. that we abstract commonalities from the perceptual co-occurrence of linguistic and situational features and build up linguistic knowledge about indexicality through processes of cognitive entrenchment and schematisation, in which factors such as frequency, salience and contingency play a role. However, this assumption has not yet been systematically investigated by examining a wide range of expressions and contexts, taking into account data on language use and speaker knowledge. To do so, it is necessary to combine different approaches of language description: register analysis, which shows that the use of linguistic expressions is related to situational context; corpus pragmatics, which shows that the relationship between linguistic form (e.g. chat) and communicative function (what you do when you use the verb) is not a one-to-one mapping; and lexicogrammatical research, which shows that language use exhibits patterns in the use of words in grammatical structures that are related to differences in meaning and situational context. In order to understand usage-based indexicality in more detail, the project will carry out a systematic investigation on the basis of German communication verbs (CVs). The research will be conducted in two subprojects: On the one hand, large amounts of data of language use, i.e. texts and conversations, from different areas of private, institutional and public communication will be analysed in order to determine frequency-based associations between the use of CVs and situational contexts. On the other hand, experimental methods such as rating, elicitation and pile sorting will be used to determine speaker knowledge about the association of CVs with situational contexts. The results of the two subprojects will be compared in order to determine which of the associations identified in language use and in speaker knowledge converge, diverge or are complementary. The analysis covers 1) the systematics of indexicality for CVs, 2) the relationship between indexicality and form-function mapping and 3) similarities between communicative constellations based on indexicality profiles. The project will contribute to research into the metalinguistic lexicon. Its findings will provide a basis that can be used for application in lexicography and language teaching.