research | Rick Nouwen

Exaggeration

How can we understand the rhetorical function that exaggeration plays in settings from everyday conversation to political discourse? My view is that hyperbole is not a rational linguistic phenomenon, but rather a result of cognitive processing akin to that involved in so called super-normal stimuli like caricatures or Tinbergen's famous mock herring gull beaks. I want to understand exaggerated language better and investigate how to think about the relation between exaggeration and truthfulness. How can we distinguish harmless exaggeration from malicious hyperbole?

Evaluative meaning

Language is rich with evaluative meaning. Why do we say of someone who is very late that they are 'horribly', 'terribly' or 'pretty' late? My view is that natural language constantly multitasks, combining objective and subjective information, mixing denotation and connotation. This allows us to efficiently use language to convey very rich ideas about the world, including our own inner world. One example of this is what I call the Goldilocks effect, the fact that we tend to use words with negative valence to express extreme things ('Sue is terribly nice') and words with positive valence for milder judgments ('Sue is pretty nice').

Large Language Models

Given the enormous impact that generative artificial intelligence has had on our lives and on our planet, it is remarkable how little we understand of how these systems do what they do. What do LLMs do when they communicate with humans? On the surface their linguistic capabilities are human-like, but can we find a way of describing more accurately what is going on when they use language? And, importantly, we need to also ask the question the other way around: What do humans do when they communicate with AI? How do we anthropomophise them, and how does that affect our relationship with this new technology?

Discourse and anaphora

How do we build a rich meaningful narrative by stringing together sentences? What are the processes that create coherence between the building blocks of discourse? I am particularly interested in anaphora and how we keep track of the individuals, entities, events and facts that we refer to in our daily use of language.

Quantifiers and Degrees

How do we express how much there is of something? Languages offer a surprisingly complex toolbox for talking about quantities and degrees. The challenge in this line of work is to make sense of that complexity. One sub-theme concerns the meaning of number words? Surely 'two' just means 2, right? It turns out to be quite a bit more interesting.