Abstract
The paper brings together some ideas from formal pragmatics, information theory, and signal processing theory to provide a computational model of some aspects of linguistic comprehension. It presents an account of subject matters (or questions-under-discussion) according to which they are filters that are applied to sentences for the purpose of denoising and signal amplification. This framework is applied to recent work on conversational exculpature and enrichment. Then (and very speculatively), it proposes an upper bound on the quantity of information that can be conveyed by subject matters.
How to attend
This is a read-ahead and/or presentation seminar. The meetings have a hybrid format. We meet in person in GM 467 and digitally on Zoom (Zoom login required).
The meeting link, along with a copy of the paper to be discussed, will be made available in advance via the mailing list.