We are happy to announce a talk by Corien Bary and Harriet Yates (Nijmegen) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.
Date: May 22, 2025
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: fEMG as a window into conversational commitments: validating the method and further applications (joint work with Bob van Tiel and Peter de Swart)
Abstract:
This presentation explores the assignment of commitments in conversation. While theoretical work has explored the range of commitment-bearing acts, key questions remain unresolved, such as the role of addressees, the gradability of commitment, and the effect of evidentials. To empirically address these questions, we propose facial electromyography (fEMG) as a novel method in this field, to detect implicit affective reactions to commitment violations. We present our proof-of-method study which demonstrates that commitment violations elicit strong ‘frowning’ corrugator muscle activation (associated with negative affect). In an ongoing follow-up study we apply this method to measure the effect of reportative evidentiality. Specifically, we test whether indicating hearsay evidence for one’s claim modulates perceived speaker commitment and whether the syntactic form (here, embedding vs. parenthetical constructions) makes a difference. The findings highlight fEMG’s potential to uncover subtle norms in conversation, with implications for pragmatics, semantics, and multimodal communication.