2023
Anticipation and intention attribution: Evidence from children
Vilde Reksnes Is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh working on experimental and developmental pragmatics.
Time and place: Mar. 14, 2024 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM, GMH 652
Abstract:
Studies on production and comprehension have disclosed seemingly contradictory preferences in comprehenders and speakers. While speakers tend to make production choices that favour the inclusion of non-typical or otherwise informative content, typicality is favoured in comprehension (e.g. is associated with processing ease). However, recent work shows that comprehenders are aware of speakers' production preferences and take these into account when they anticipate upcoming content, and the more a speaker's role as an intentional communicator is highlighted, the more the comprehender comes to expect non-typical content from the speaker. In other words, the ability to reason about a speaker's informativity goals guides comprehenders' expectations. In contrast to adults, children's input may be characterised by less informative language (e.g. more mentions of typical events and properties), possibly leading children to expect speech to transparently reflect what the world is like. In this talk, I will present an ongoing study using sentence completion tasks to test whether children (aged 5-11) show informativity-driven reasoning about the speaker in a similar way to adults when making guesses about upcoming content.
Meaning beyond Truth Conditions: Expressives, Personas, Affect
Elin McCready is professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Aoyama Gakuin University. Her research is particularly focused on phenomena such as evidentials, honorifics and slurs. She is an associate editor of Semantics and Pragmatics, and was the 2021 recipient of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Time and place: Sep. 8, 2023 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, PAM 4
Abstract
Three kinds of meaning are considered: expressive meaning, social meanings in the sense of indexation of personas, and the generation of affect. She presents a characterization of each meaning type together with the kind of formal analysis that’s been proposed and some empirical motivation: slurs and honorifics (for expressive content), social personas as indexed in speech overtly or covertly (via dogwhistling), and the interpretation of literary text.
This is a joint event between ILN's Departmental linguistics seminars and IFIKK's The future of pragmatics lecture series.
Christine Howes: Kids say the funniest things: Managing mismatches in dialogues with children
Our next guest speaker in the Pragmatics series will be Dr. Christine Howes, Head of the Linguistics and Theory of Science unit, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Time and place: May 4, 2023 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, GMH 152
Abstract
Children's acquisition of language requires their learning of not just words/concepts and linguistic structure but how these interact in dialogue with knowledge about the world, our interlocutors, the shared environment and social norms. In this talk I will explore how children acquire and use the rhetorical resources that they need in dialogue, and what happens when they misuse them -- either accidentally or deliberately as in the case of humour.
Organizer
Pragmatics: Theory & Experiments
Age changes in children’s exploration of unexplained phenomena
Guest talk by Tone Hermansen, postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Psychology, University of Oslo.
Time and place: Mar. 30, 2023 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, GMH 141
Abstract
Prior research on children’s selective exploration indicates an early emerging sensitivity to knowledge uncertainty, which in turn guides children’s exploration and improves their learning about novel objects and their properties. Such exploration, whether it takes the form of questions or of first-hand exploration, is often aimed at obtaining explanations for these surprising phenomena. When presented with a surprising claim, older children engage in more exploration than younger children; they also engage in more targeted exploration. These age-related differences in exploration may reflect age-related increases in the ability to reason about why a surprising claim may or may not be true—their understanding of the link between claims and evidence. In this talk, I will some of my prior research leading me to this proposal. I will also present data from an (ongoing) study that test the hypothesis that older children’s decision that knowledge is incomplete will vary depending on whether they are provided with a claim that does vs. does not include an explanation.
Organizer
Pragmatics: Theory & Experiments
2021
Inaugural lecture: Ira Noveck: Isolating the pragmatic contribution that can be found in words
14.15–15.30, 11th May 2021, online. Please email us to get the Zoom link
Our first event was a talk from Ira Noveck, one of the leading figures in experimental pragmatics.
Abstract
After discussing (what one can learn from) an attempt to replicate a standard conversational (scalar) implicature effect through crowdsourcing, I turn to work that attempts to use signature pragmatic effects (reaction-time slowdowns and developmental delays) to investigate cases in which it is safe to assume that a word's meaning includes a pragmatic component. In the interest of time, I will focus mainly on recently accepted work that investigates the European French "contrapositive" response, Si. This response felicitously deals with the potential ambiguity in negative polar questions (such as "It [the candy] is not in the white box?") by indicating that the implicit affirmative is indeed the case (that the candy is indeed in the white box).