Linguistics Seminar Talk - Paula Rubio-Fernandez

Title:  The Cognitive Trinity of Common Ground

Abstract  

Human communication is built around interlocutors’ common ground (CG), or the information they assume to share. Despite having been the focus of intense interdisciplinary research for more than 60 years, we do not yet understand how CG works, or even what exactly it is. In this talk I will introduce a new research program that is essential to understanding CG: I propose to study CG as a product of cultural evolution. This approach requires identifying (i) those cognitive capacities that are required for the emergence of CG in human cognition, and (ii) how those capacities interact in (a) the development of CG through children’s social learning across cultures; (b) its formation through social interaction across the lifespan, and (c) its management in conversation across languages. I hypothesize that forming and using CG is a complex human ability that emerges from the interaction of three cognitive capacities — joint attention, shared memory, and the use of reference systems — under a rationality principle. This is what I informally call the Cognitive Trinity of Common Ground, which could also be described as a naïve model of rational memory.