GRADS

Together with colleague Melania S. Masià (UIB), in the upcoming four years I will be working to fulfill the goals of the project GRADS (Grammatical Rivalry, At-Issueness, and Discourse Structure), granted to me as the PI by the Spanish Research Agency and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2025-170133NB-C22), as part of the coordinated project GRASP (Grammatical Rivalry across Semantics and Pragmatics), which investigates the role of competing alternatives (rivals) in linguistic interpretation. While the associated project GRAMS (Grammatical Rivalry and Morphosemantics, PI: Louise McNally) focuses on rivalry at the level of word formation, GRADS examines how competition among expressions operates at the phrasal and sentential levels. Together, the two projects offer an integrated perspective on how linguistic alternatives shape meaning across different layers of the language system.

The overarching goal of GRADS is twofold: to model how conventional and contextual factors interact in shaping the choice of emotive or evaluative expressions across different discourse dimensions (at-issue vs. non-at-issue), and to establish the role of discourse expectations – operationalized through coherence or rhetorical relations – in guiding the speaker’s choice between competing referring expressions. Crucially, a backward-looking approach to at-issueness (i.e., one that defines at-issue content in terms of its relevance to the QUD) is complemented by a forward-looking perspective (i.e., one that considers the legitimate future discourse moves licensed by rhetorical relations). This dual perspective enables a novel approach to the licensing conditions of referential expressions – one that attends to the interaction of evaluativity, modification, referentiality, and discourse structure – and thereby creates a natural connection between the two general objectives.