Linguistics major Jack Duff will defend his senior honors thesis “Somebody’s fool: Theory of mind and the interpretation of epithets” Thursday, April 26 at 10:30am in ILC N470, followed by lots of time for discussion. All are welcome, particularly fellow majors! The thesis comprises research advised by Lyn Frazier and Chuck Clifton. Jack will begin a PhD in Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz this coming fall. An abstract is below.

Abstract: Epithets, like other perspective-dependent language, have been observed to allow shifted interpretations in certain passages, where they are interpreted to reflect the attitude of a character, and not the Speaker of the utterance. This thesis offers an overview of existing research on epithets and other perspective-dependent language, and presents a series of psycholinguistic experiments aimed at refining models of how these character-oriented interpretations arise. The results offer evidence that perspective in language, while it is used in online interpretation, is the result of extra-grammatical systems, and is in general influenced by the depicted content of discourse rather than the linguistic form.