Chris Cummins

Chancellor's Fellow in Linguistics and English Language, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh

Dr Chris Cummins is a Chancellor's Fellow in the department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh. Before coming to Edinburgh, Chris worked with J. P. de Ruiter and colleagues in Bielefeld as part of the SFB 673, Alignment in Communication. Prior to that, he was a PhD student at the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics (RCEAL), University of Cambridge (now part of DTAL).

Chris's research is predominantly in experimental semantics and pragmatics, and focuses on the motivation for speakers' choice of expressions, and particularly on the interplay between strategic and automatic processes. His PhD focused on the meaning and use of numerically-quantified expressions (and was supported by a University of Cambridge Domestic Research Studentship).In his ongoing work, now supported by a Chancellor's Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh,Chris is exploring the usefulness of constraint-based models in predicting how form and context interact in the generation of implicatures and the projection of presuppositions.

In particular, Chris is interested in how the prior mention of expressions can promote their reuse, and the pragmatic consequences of that. He hope that this work will shed some additional light on priming effects, with particular reference to whether they are form-based or tend to invoke higher levels of organisation.Chris is also continuing to work with J. P. de Ruiter on a Bayesian model of incremental recognition of speech acts in dialogue.

The goal of this is to characterise how hearers understand the broad purpose of the speaker's utterance rapidly and incrementally. They hope that the findings will be both relevant to the understanding of human interaction and useful for the enhancement of artificial dialogue systems.Chris also worked on the production and comprehension of non-asserted content in several small projects, supported by the EURO-XPRAG network and by the Bielefelder Nachswuchfonds. He was part of two other projects funded by EURO-XPRAG:- a project to develop and test a constraint-based account of numerical quantifier usage and interpretation, with Uli Sauerland and Stephanie Solt (ZAS, Berlin)- a project attempting to document a preference in processing for the use of approximate expressions of quantity, with Solt and Marijan Palmović (Zagreb).

Chris's other research interests include the computational modelling of various aspects of language use, and the development and criticism of novel experimental and statistical methodologies. He is also interested in neurolinguistics and has contributed to a project on the neurocognition of prosody (PI Brechtje Post).