Talk: Filippo Domaneschi
The next speaker in the Future of Pragmatic series will be Filippo Domaneschi, professor at the University of Genova, Italy. Filippo will talk about his work on expressive language.
Time and place: Dec. 5, 2022 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM, GMH 652
Abstract
The literature on expressives (“bastard”, “jerk”, etc.) converges on two claims.
First: to use expressives felicitously, the context doesn’t need to entail that the target of the expressive is bad, as long as the speaker feels negatively about them.
Second: the content associated with expressives is speaker-oriented (“The speaker feels negatively about the target”) rather than target-oriented (“The target is bad/has done something wrong”).
In this talk I present some studies focused on predicative rather than referential uses of the Italian expressive “stronzo” (tr. “jerk”) which challenge both claims. Our results speak against the first claim: in the absence of information as to whether the target is bad, expressives are judged less acceptable than other negative evaluative terms (e.g., “unbearable”). They also challenge the second claim: using expressives is more acceptable in the target-oriented condition (“X is an underhanded and deceitful person”) than in the subjective or intersubjective conditions (“The speaker dislikes X”, “The speaker and others dislike X”). These results open new questions about how to characterize espressive content.
Organizer
DEVCOM
Talk: Mikhail Kissine
Mikhail Kissine is professor of linguistics at the Université libre de Bruxelles and Principal Investigator of the research group on Autism, ACTE. He works at the interface between linguistics and cognitive science.
Time and place: June 8, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, On Zoom
Language and (versus) communication in autism
Mikhail Kissine, Université libre de Bruxelles
Some of us will gather on campus to participate in seminar room 219, Georg Morgenstiernes hus. All welcome!
Organizer
Nicholas Allott and Ingrid Lossius Falkum
Talk: Diana Mazzarella and Nausicaa Pouscoulous
Time and place: May 11, 2022 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM, On Zoom
About the speakers
Diana Mazzarella is Professor at the Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Neuchâtel. Her current work lies in the interdisciplinary field of pragmatics, which explores language and communication from a cognitive perspective.
Nausicaa Pouscoulous is Associate Professor in Linguistics at University College London. Her research combines experimental and theoretical approaches and focuses on linguistic phenomena at the interface between semantics and pragmatics, such as scalar implicature, presupposition and metaphor. In recent years she has been particularly interested in the acquisition of pragmatic abilities in typically and atypically developing children.
Ironic speakers, vigilant children
Young children are notoriously bad at understanding ironical statements. Unlike what has been shown for other pragmatic phenomena (e.g., various types of implicatures and meaning shifts), the onset of irony comprehension (between 4 and 6 years old) seems insensitive to task manipulation. In this talk we present an account of irony which sheds light on this late development.
Verbal irony characteristically involves the expression of a derogatory, dissociative attitude. The ironical speaker is not only stating a blatant falsehood or irrelevant proposition; she is also communicating her stance towards its epistemic status. The centrality of attitude recognition in irony understanding opens up the question of which cognitive abilities make it possible. Drawing on Wilson (2009), we provide a full-fledged account of the role of epistemic vigilance in irony understanding and suggest that it relies on the exercise of first- and second-order vigilance towards the content, the ironic speaker as well as the source of the irony.
The crucial role of epistemic vigilance, particularly second-order epistemic vigilance, can explain why irony comprehension is difficult for pre-schoolers and possibly even some adult populations.
Talk: Valentina Bambini
Time and place: Apr. 26, 2022 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM, Lite seminarrom 141, Georg Morgenstiernes hus
For those who want to meet on campus, a room is booked. To join in via Zoom, please email the organisers for the link.
About Valentina Bambini
Valentina Bambini is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University School for Advanced Studies (IUSS) of Pavia, Staff Member of the IUSS Lab for Neurolinguistics, Computational Linguistics, and Theoretical Syntax (NETS), and Coordinator of the joint IUSS-San Raffaele University PhD Program in Cognitive Neuroscience and Philosophy of Mind. She is expert in neurolinguistics including neuropragmatics and experimental pragmatics, focusing on the cognitive and neural underpinnings of communicative abilities. She will talk to us, via Zoom, about some of her recent work on metaphor and theory of mind.
Metaphors, pragmatics and theory of mind: A developmental perspective
Valentina Bambini
Is pragmatics a special type of theory of mind? This question has been addressed through a variety of approaches, from brain imaging to studies on atypical populations. In this talk I will address the issue of the relationship between pragmatics and theory of mind from a developmental perspective, focusing on a specific aspect of the pragmatic competence, namely metaphor understanding. I will present a series of studies on metaphor comprehension in middle childhood indicating that children’s ability to interpret metaphors develops hand in hand with mind reading skills, yet the two domains are sufficiently distinct (Lecce et al. 2019, Del Sette et al. 2020, 2021). I will present also a novel training program to promote metaphor comprehension (MetaCom) in children (Tonini et al., 2022), and describe its effects on metaphor skills, as well as reading skills and socio-cognitive skills.
References
Lecce, S., Ronchi, L., Del Sette, P., Bischetti, L., and Bambini, V., 2019. Interpreting physical and mental metaphors: Is Theory of Mind associated with pragmatics in middle childhood? Journal of Child Language, 46 (2), 393–407.
Del Sette, P., Bambini, V., Bischetti, L., and Lecce, S., 2020. Longitudinal associations between theory of mind and metaphor understanding during middle childhood. Cognitive Development, 56, 100958.
Del Sette, P., Ronchi, L., Bambini, V., and Lecce, S., 2021. Longitudinal associations between metaphor understanding and peer relationships in middle childhood. Infant and Child Development, (April), 1–22.
Tonini, E., Lecce, S., Del Sette, P., Bianco, F., Canal, P., and Bambini, V., 2022. Efficacy and benefits of the MetaCom training to promote metaphor comprehension in typical development. First Language.
Organizer
Nicholas Allott and Ingrid Lossius Falkum
Talk: Anna Papafragou - Informativeness in pragmatic development
Anna Papafragou, who is professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, is a leading expert on experimental semantics and pragmatics, language acquisition, and language and cognition.
Time and place: Mar. 9, 2022 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM, On Zoom
Informativeness in pragmatic development
Anna Papafragou
In this talk I explore the origins and development of pragmatic competence taking informativeness as a case study. I present a series of studies that seek to explain the complex pattern of children’s successes and failures in this area. I show that children’s pragmatic difficulties are linked to accessing relevant (and not simply informationally stronger) lexical alternatives during the computation of pragmatic inferences. I discuss the role of assessing the speaker’s epistemic state during the calculation of pragmatic inferences, and generalize the findings on children’s pragmatic competence beyond language to non-linguistic symbols. I conclude by sketching an integrated view of the development of pragmatic abilities that connects pragmatics to non-linguistic cognition.
Organizer
Nicholas Allott and Ingrid Lossius Falkum
Talk: briefing on DEVCOM and Creativity and Convention in Pragmatic Development projects
Participants in two connected projects at UiO led by Ingrid Lossius Falkum, DEVCOM and Creativity and Convention in Pragmatic Development, present their research questions and explain how they are going to test them.
Time and place: Feb. 23, 2022 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM, On Zoom
Participants in DEVCOM and Creativity and Convention in Pragmatic Development explain what they are investigating and what experiments they are going to carry out. There will be four short talks.
Brief overviews of the talks
Rebecca Kvisler Iversen
I will present a study that explores the hypothesis that children’s developing awareness of the sense conventions in their linguistic environment in part underlie their preference for literal interpretations of ironical utterances before the age of six.
Claire Prendergast
Does strict adherence to sense conventions affect how 4-year-olds but not 3-year-olds comprehend figurative and literal noun-noun compounds?
I will present some research investigating social and priming effects in how 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds handle conventional and non-conventional literal and figurative noun-noun compounds during an image selection task. The experiment tests for a possible effect of social influence on choice of visual referent as well as the effect that priming component parts of the noun-noun compounds may have on gaze behaviour at test.
Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos
Some adjectives, such ‘straight’ seem to have a precise meaning in the absence of context (perfectly straight), but nevertheless allow for imprecise interpretations (e.g, ‘straight enough’) in certain contexts. In two experiments, we investigated how this pragmatic adjustment translates to effort during comprehension, and how both the interpretation and effort are mediated by contextual factors.
Kristen Frances Schroeder
I will be presenting two studies which explore novel metonymy comprehension among children with and without autism spectrum conditions.
There will be a sequel (or sequels) next term when we have some experimental results to share with you.
Organizer
Nicholas Allott and Ingrid Lossius Falkum