We are happy to announce a talk by Morgan Moyer (Barcelona) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
Zoom link: https://uni-frankfurt.zoom-x.de/j/62660316332?pwd=94KnkxFireEQFCWBGpi35ZwrClwoLa.1
Date: October 22, 2026
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: Meaning Beyond Truth: A Psychosemantic Approach to Affective Meaning
Abstract:
How are different kinds of linguistic meaning represented and accessed in cognition? Research in semantics and pragmatics distinguishes truth-conditional content from presuppositions, conventional implicatures, and other kinds of non-at-issue meaning. Experimental pragmatics and psycholinguistics, meanwhile, investigates how linguistic information becomes available during comprehension, how pragmatic inferences unfold over time, and how semantic features organize conceptual representations. Yet the relationship between these linguistic distinctions and the cognitive status of the content they characterize remains poorly understood.
This talk brings together two strands of experimental research to investigate this relationship. The first examines the cognitive prominence of affective valence relative to truth-conditional conceptual features. Using speeded categorization and similarity judgments, I investigate whether affective information is especially accessible and whether it plays a distinctive role in organizing conceptual representations. The second examines evaluative inferences associated with „thick“ moral adjectives, such as „generous“ and „egotistical“, using diagnostics of contradiction, similarity, at-issueness, and projection to characterize the relationship between evaluative and descriptive content.
I connect these research programs through the problem of linking theoretical distinctions to experimental measures. Research on pragmatic inferences highlights the assumptions involved in interpreting behavioral responses as evidence for particular kinds of meaning (Degen & Goodman 2014; Jasbi, Waldon & Degen 2019). Meanwhile, Abrusán’s (2011) account of presupposition motivates a connection between pragmatic status and the allocation of attention. Together, these approaches invite us to question whether distinctions in linguistic meaning correspond to differences in cognitive accessibility, representational organization, or how information is integrated in interpretation.
I ask whether the cognitive prominence of affective information relates to the pragmatic behavior of evaluative content, or whether accessibility, conceptual similarity, and pragmatic status constitute distinct dimensions of meaning. By bringing these questions into dialogue, I aim to develop an empirically grounded account of how linguistic meaning distinctions relate to the representations and processes through which language interfaces with cognition.