| 
Lecturer in
Cognitive Science
tel: 216-368-0115
office: Crawford 604B
vera DOT tobin AT case DOT edu
|
Vera Tobin
PhD in English Language and Literature, University of Maryland
Research interests: Social cognition, joint attention, pragmatics and discourse analysis, cognitive approaches to language and literature
My research is primarily dedicated to using linguistics and cognitive science to explore the interactive dimension of written discourse in a variety of media. Work in many fields has made it increasingly clear that a great deal of what we think of as linguistic meaning depends on the situated occasion in which things are said, and that it is often the product of active collaborations between speakers and hearers. These insights pose many new questions for those of us who study language in settings other than face-to-face communication. My research addresses the ways that adolescents and adults use written language to coordinate attention with others and the connection of these strategies to issues of rhetoric and style.
Some projects currently underway
Literary joint attention:
This is a multi-part study, begun in my dissertation, of the literary mechanics of joint attention. Joint attention is a fundamental aspect of social cognition where (in its most basic form) two people are both focused on an external object and mutually aware of this shared focus. This ability develops around the end of the first year of life and seems to be a crucial ingredient in acquiring language. Because it is so crucial for language and representation, joint attention also turns out to be a fertile site for literary creativity, experimentation, and anxiety.
Cognitive biases and narrative structure:
While successful communication seems to require high levels of intersubjective coordination, there is also a large body of evidence that this coordination often fails in specific ways and that communication can go on regardless. In particular, a pervasive egocentric bias known as the "curse of knowledge" can get in the way of accurately assessing what other people know or believe, and can lead us to misjudge how transparent our own and other people's intentions really are. Narratives can exploit this bias to generate impressive and satisfying aesthetic effects.
Readers and irony:
Traditionally, accounts of irony in linguistics have concentrated on what is known as "verbal irony", or sarcasm. In collaboration with Michael Israel, at the University of Maryland, I have been working on a major project to provide a cognitively realistic account of verbal, dramatic, situational, and cosmic irony within a single unified framework. Our account builds on theories which treat irony as a form of echoic mention or pretense, but draws on a much broader range of ironic phenomena. Related research includes work on cognitive biases as tools for generating ironic distance, and the study of conventionally ironizing narrative elements as structures susceptible to semantic bleaching.
|
