WS20: Recent Advances in Experimental and Computational Pragmatics

Seminar (in English):      

held by:           Ryzhova, Margarita, Dr. Frances Yung

time:                14:15 - 15:45 hrs, on Fridays

start date:       06/11/2020
                         

suitable           MSc in Language Science and Technology /
for:                   BSc in Computational Linguistics
 

 

I m p o r t a n t   I n f o r m a t i o n

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Language is the basic medium for people to communicate with each other. It provides a versatile system to encode meanings in numerous ways. However, in communication, people do not only use the literal meanings of language; meanings are also inferred from context. For example, by saying "John is a shark" we usually do not mean that John is actually a shark but we rather refer to some personal characteristics of John that are shared with a shark, based on the conversational context.

Pragmatics is about how situational context contributes to meaning, and it is an essential aspect of language. Critically, many facets of pragmatic processing are still under active exploration. What are the factors that facilitate pragmatic processing? What is the effect of individual differences in pragmatic processing? Is pragmatic processing costly in nature? In this seminar, we will discuss papers on different pragmatic phenomena (incl. metaphors, referring expressions, scalar implicatures, etc.) We will explore various experimental designs that attempt to answer the questions mentioned above. We will also cover papers on recent advances in computational modelling of pragmatic inference.

 


last modified 2020-09-15 by vera
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