Conference on theoretical pragmatics, Berlin, Germany
13 October 2011 - 13 October 2011
Germany
A conference on theoretical pragmatics will take place from 13 to 15 October 2011 in Berlin, Germany.
The last decade has seen a surge of new research in pragmatics and several new theoretical frameworks emerged: different variants of game theoretic and optimality theoretic approaches, non-Gricean approaches to implicatures, and multi-dimensional approaches to meaning. Research in other frameworks, such as Neo-Gricean pragmatics, speech act-theory, theories of vagueness and presupposition theory, has also progressed rapidly.
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. It studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on the linguistic knowledge (e.g. grammar, lexicon etc.) of the speaker and listener, but also on the context of the conversation.
In many areas, an influx of researchers with training in formal semantics has brought formal precision to pragmatic theories. This has led to new empirical predictions, but also sometimes shifted or blurred the semantics-pragmatics boundary.
The conference will examine these different approaches and compare their results and methodologies. The interaction between experimental and theoretical approaches will be specially highlighted, with planned presentations of theoretical models which have a basis in experimental studies, or allow for experimentally testable predictions.For further information, please visit: http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/workshop_tprag.html(opens in new window)
The last decade has seen a surge of new research in pragmatics and several new theoretical frameworks emerged: different variants of game theoretic and optimality theoretic approaches, non-Gricean approaches to implicatures, and multi-dimensional approaches to meaning. Research in other frameworks, such as Neo-Gricean pragmatics, speech act-theory, theories of vagueness and presupposition theory, has also progressed rapidly.
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. It studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on the linguistic knowledge (e.g. grammar, lexicon etc.) of the speaker and listener, but also on the context of the conversation.
In many areas, an influx of researchers with training in formal semantics has brought formal precision to pragmatic theories. This has led to new empirical predictions, but also sometimes shifted or blurred the semantics-pragmatics boundary.
The conference will examine these different approaches and compare their results and methodologies. The interaction between experimental and theoretical approaches will be specially highlighted, with planned presentations of theoretical models which have a basis in experimental studies, or allow for experimentally testable predictions.For further information, please visit: http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/workshop_tprag.html(opens in new window)