Professor Billy Clark of Northumbria University has been awarded a two-year Major Research Fellowship from The Leverhulme Trust to lead a significant research initiative titled 'Producing and Evaluating Style.' This project aims to shed light on the complex mental processes involved in everyday conversations, exploring how individuals craft and interpret the nuances of dialogue.
The core of the research, as posed by Professor Clark, delves into the question: "When someone says 'I'm tired' with a particular tone of voice and specific nonverbal behavior, what are the processes that led them to communicate in that particular way, and how do we, as listeners, understand what they truly mean?" The study will investigate whether these communicative acts are the result of deliberate reasoning or emerge more spontaneously, examining the interplay between these cognitive approaches.
Drawing on relevance theory, which suggests that humans utilize mental shortcuts to efficiently grasp intended meanings, Professor Clark's project will employ experimental methodologies. Participants will engage in tasks designed to predict the reception of their statements, allowing researchers to compare these predictions with actual outcomes. A stimulated recall approach will also be used, where participants articulate their communication choices immediately after speaking, providing insight into their real-time thought processes.
Professor Clark's research interests encompass linguistic semantics, pragmatics, prosodic meaning, and semantic change. His prior work has applied relevance theory to analyze meanings conveyed through various linguistic elements, including words, sentence structures, and vocal intonations. The fellowship, which commenced in September 2025, is expected to result in an academic book and potentially influence future educational resources, deepening the understanding of human interaction and the cognitive mechanisms behind natural conversation.