My research uses the study of social cognition and joint attention to examine the structure and organization of discourse and narrative in a variety of media. Social cognition is crucial to language use and acquisition. Not only is language an inherently social and cultural construction, the relative ease with which people engage in face-to-face conversation, as opposed to delivering speeches or writing essays, suggests that humans or language, or both, are optimized for thinking interactively. Joint attention is a fundamental aspect of social cognition: the ability to share attention to some object with another person and mutually recognize that the attention is shared. This ability appears to be a crucial ingredient in acquiring language.

Researchers who study joint attention frequently apply the framework to cases such as autism and early childhood, in which people's ability to understand themselves as part of these scenes is not fully developed. The study of literature, on the other hand, is continually engaged with circumstances where joint attention is relevant, highly developed, and complex. In my research, linguistics and cognitive science provide the basis for specific and particularizing claims about literature, its production, and its reception, while literary texts and the discourses surrounding them are used to support broader theoretical work about language and the mind.

Literary Joint Attention: Social Cognition and the Puzzles of Modernism

My doctoral thesis combines work in cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology with the historical and socio-cultural study of the production and reception of twentieth- and late nineteenth-century literature. This study begins with an argument for treating literature as a complex of multiple joint activities, some fictive and some factive. Theoretical analyses of discourse processing often assume that texts in general and published fictional narratives in particular should be thought of as a form of interaction between the author and the reader, in which writers and readers occupy the positions of speaker and addressee, while many theorists engaged in the humanistic study of texts object to treating them as examples of communication at all.

I start by looking at the conversations that readers have with other readers. These interactions between readers draw on many of the concrete resources of immediate conversation that authors and their readers cannot share, putting the text into the stream of talk and requesting or suggesting glosses, fresh interpretations, and alternate construals as they go. Communities of readers then often take texts as objects of joint attention to build up new conventions of interpretation. Part two of this study examines the ways that narrative discourse systematically capitalizes on certain cognitive biases that interfere with the ability to track shared knowledge and shared attention accurately. Finally, an extended case study uses joint attention to shed new light on stylistic commonalities between the classic detective story and some of the formal experiments associated with Modernism: both rely heavily on "puzzles of joint attention" that present prominent scenarios of triangulated attention in which something crucial is left out.

My major ongoing research project is an exploration of how the organization of discourse reflects and exploits cognitive biases. 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 exposed to embedded perspectives, such as those of self-conscious narrators or the reported beliefs of non-narrator characters, can fall prey to the curse of knowledge. Texts can take advantage of the tendency of readers to align their viewpoints with embedded views to engineer "rug-pull" endings that surprise readers with information that contradicts the over-generalized propositions. Contrariwise, texts can prompt readers to recognize characters' susceptibility to the curse of knowledge, showing them to be poor judges of the transparency of their own communicative intentions. The discrepancy between characters' and readers' understandings is a species of dramatic irony. In recognizing the source of this discrepancy, readers "zoom out" to a more distant perspective on the characters' perspectives, so that a perspective that was first construed subjectively is in this way newly construed as an object of conceptualization.

Recently I have been working a great deal with one particular group of readers, the so-called "Sherlockians". These fans of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories collaborate in what they call the "Great Game" by writing scholarly articles, squibs, and entire books under the conceit that Sherlock Holmes and Watson were real people (and sometimes that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a fictional one, as well).

I have been investigating how the conventions of this game have shifted over time, sometimes in ways that closely parallel previously observed phenomena of language change. For example, over generations of play, once overtly parodic and ironic elements of the original Sherlockian style have become routinized. In lexical semantics, the routinization of an expression is associated with signal simplification and semantic bleaching. Sherlockian play undergoes a similar process, where more recent texts seem to invoke a historically ironic frame that has been bleached of much of its ironic meaning (Tobin 2006). Future research in this area will address other social and sociolinguistic questions regarding these processes. For example, who are the vectors of change for the explicit and implicit rules of these interpretive games?

I also study irony in general as a linguistic and cognitive phenomenon. 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.