Lyon will be hosting the 4th Experimental Pragmatics conference in April 2009 (23-25th). This edition will adopt a broad perspective and bring together speakers and discussants from varied theoretical and empirical backgrounds. Invited speakers (including Gerry Altmann, Richard Breheny, Peter Hobson, Boaz Keysar, Walter Schaeken, Julie Sedivy, Michael Tomasello, Kai von Fintel) will present research on four topics :

1) Sentence processing
2) Experimental pragmatics in conditionals
3) Direct reference
4) Autism and Pragmatics

In addition to these thematic sessions, we welcome the submission of papers from scholars who study experimental pragmatics in connection with semantic approaches, language development, impaired communication, non-verbal and non-human communication, non literal language, negation, presupposition, reference, sentence processing,etc. Abstracts will be anonymously refereed by members of the program committee.

The conference will take place at the Institut des Sciences de l'Homme (ISH), which is near the downtown area (14, avenue Berthelot, 69007 Lyon).

Date to remember:
Deadline for submission: January 16 2009, 9 pm.

More information to follow on (advanced) registration. The fees are to be determined, but likely to be no more than 60 euros.

To submit a paper and register please visit:
http://xprag.l2c2.isc.cnrs.fr/XPrag/

Abstracts should be one-page plus an additional page for examples,
graphs, tables, and references. We are using an electronic abstract
submission system.

The 23-25th of April 2009 in Lyon.

Confirmed Speakers include:
Gerry Altmann
Richard Breheny
Peter Hobson
Boaz Keysar
Walter Schaeken
Julie Sedivy
Michael Tomasello
Kai von Fintel

Stay tuned for a call for papers.

NOTE that there was a mistake in some versions of the first call for papers: the conference website address is:

http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~uicm2/

Description:

The second edition of the Brussels Conference on Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models will take place on July 19-21, 2008. While the first edition addressed the issue of the semantics/pragmatics interface from a cognitive perspective, this time we wish to adopt a broader perspective. The conference aims at reaching across disciplinary boundaries and bringing together researchers who, though belonging to different schools or traditions, all take a view of interpretation that is informed by cognitive concerns. We are convinced that a better understanding of how utterances come to be endowed with meaning calls for collaboration between various subfields of linguistics — syntax, formal semantics, cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, evolutionary linguistics —, as well as with other disciplines, such as developmental and cognitive psychology, cognitive sciences, and philosophy of language. However, whatever the theoretical background and the
empirical phenomena to be accounted for, in our view the ultimate test for any theory of utterance interpretation is that it should be psychologically plausible. We hope that the second conference on Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models will help popularize this idea.

Papers are from:
Giosué Baggio & Michiel Van Lambalgen (on the Imperfective Paradox),
Guy Politzer (Quantifer entailments),
Paula Rubio Fernandez (on metaphor), and
Florian Schwartz (on presupposed content).

Organized by Uli Sauerland (ZAS, Berlin), Anton Benz (ZAS, Berlin), Manfred Krifka (Humboldt University and ZAS, Berlin), and Kazuko Yatsushiro (Humboldt University, Berlin), it promises be the source of exchanges and new data.

For more information: http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/xprag/

The ability to assess the truth of an utterance, the validity of an inference or the reliability of a mental representation - including those inferred from observable behaviour - is a fundamental aspect of human cognition. "A is justified in thinking that p", "B is trustworthy when she says that q", "C is deceiving", are examples of evaluative representations typically involved in knowledge acquisition.

More below the fold.....

Submission deadline: 1 Jan 2008
http://www.erp-review.org/cfp8.php

CALL FOR PAPERS
--------------
The ability to assess the truth of an utterance, the validity of an inference or the reliability of a mental representation - including those inferred from observable behaviour - is a fundamental aspect of human cognition. "A is justified in thinking that p", "B is trustworthy when she says that q", "C is deceiving", are examples of evaluative representations typically involved in knowledge acquisition.

Epistemology has traditionally focused on the normative conditions under which knowledge is acquired, thus producing a corpus of norms on the justification of knowledge claims. From a different perspective, we might ask whether a psychological explanation can be provided to account for epistemic evaluation abilities. How can empirical investigations elucidate the nature, development and cognitive function of evaluative representations? Are there domain-specific, cross-cultural capacities underpinning the evaluation of truth and reliability of mental representations? Eventually, what are the relations between the norms described by epistemology and the actual psychological processes underpinning evaluation of truth and epistemic reliability?

The study of mental processes underlying epistemological skills may support the hypothesis of a dedicated "folk epistemology" system. Over the last decades many cases of domain-specific cognitive systems with dedicated inferential resources have been identified in infants and higher primates. These include folk physics, folk biology, folk arithmetics, folk psychology, among others. Can the ability to judge truth and epistemic reliability be accounted for interms of a folk epistemology system? The goal of the present volume is to bring together contributions on this topic from different areas of investigation such as: philosophy, developmental psychology, cognitive ethology, social cognition, pragmatics, sociology of knowledge, cultural anthropology.

Relevant questions include the following:

- What is the proper domain of a folk epistemology system?
- Do epistemic evaluations involve conscious thinking?
- To what extent does language enhance epistemic evaluations?
- Are there selective impairments of folk epistemology capacities?
- Are epistemic evaluations human-specific?
- How does folk epistemology contribute to rational thinking?
- Are meta-representations required for epistemic evaluation?
- What are the relations (if any) between normative epistemology, commonsense epistemology and folk epistemology? How does folk epistemology relate to our naive understanding of truth?
- Which aspects of culture could be explained on the basis of a folk epistemology?
- Do deferential practices rely on the existence of a folk epistemology?
- Do subjects share the same epistemological intuitions across cultures? Or do epistemologies vary across cultures?
- Are there foreseeable evolutionary grounds for the selection of folk epistemology capacities?
- The aim of the present project is to synthesise and evaluate the progress made in the research fields concerned, and to promote an interdisciplinary discussion on the natural bases of epistemic evaluation capacities.

GUEST AUTHORS
-------------
Maurice BLOCH, London School of Economics
Fabrice CLEMENT, University of Geneva
Steven STICH, Rutgers University

SUBMISSIONS
----------
Submissions should be addressed electronically to: folk.epistemology@erp-review.org.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS
-----------------------
Papers should describe original and previously unpublished work. Submitted papers must be in English and should not exceed 8000 words, with an abstract of up to 200 words. The following formats are accepted for submission: RTF, PDF, DOC, LATEX. Authors are invited to follow the stylistic guidelines, templates and detailed instructions available here: http://www.erp-review.org/guidelines.php

Submitted papers will be reviewed by the Editors and blind-reviewed by two anonymous referees. For the purpose of blind refereeing, authors are requested not to include their name and affiliation in their manuscript, but in a separate file. Each submission should consist of two distinct files:

- A frontpage containing the title of the paper, the name and affiliation of the author(s), as well as any acknowledgment.
- The manuscript of the paper (containing only the title, the abstract and the body of the article).

More information for prospective authors are available on this page: http://www.erp-review.org/guidelines.php

IMPORTANT DATES
---------------
1 Jan 2008: submission deadline
1 Dec 2008: date of publication

ABOUT
-----
Established in Geneva in 1994, the European Review of Philosophy is a peer-reviewed journal edited yearly at the Jean Nicod Institute, Paris. It publishes thematic volumes on philosophical and foundational issues in cognitive science.

CONTACT
--------
Intending authors should make direct contact with the guest editors of the relevant issue by writing to: folk.epistemology@erp-review.org

For other inquiries please refer to our contact page: http://www.erp-review.org/contact.php

Important dates are:

1 September 2007: abstract submission
15 September 2007: notification of acceptance
15 December 2007: provisional programme
27-29 February, 2008: conference

Billy

Billy

. . . . .

Call for Papers

Call Deadline: 31-Aug-2007
Experimental Pragmatics 2007 is a sequel to three very successful,
independently organized meetings in 2001 in Lyon, 2003 in Milan, and
2005 in Cambridge (UK). However, it differs from these meetings by
addressing more topics and connecting also to results in semantics.
The earlier successful meetings focused mostly on implicatures in
acquisition and polarity. The planned topics at this meeting are:
types, negation, implicatures and the semantics-pragmatics boundary.
The conference is planned around four three-hour sessions for each of
the four topics just mentioned. Each session will consist of two
invited one-hour lectures and a subsequent one-hour discussion on the
topic. The discussion will be introduced by an invited commentary of
between 20 and 30 minute length and then the discussion will be open
to all participants. In addition to the four thematic sessions, the
conference will feature a eight submitted presentations each 20 min
plus 10 min for discussion long, and a large number of poster
presentations. The submitted talks and poster presentations are
selected on the basis of a double-blind abstract evaluation process
involving the invited speakers. The reviewers take into account
scientific quality of the abstract (primary) and special interest for
the four themes of the conference (secondary).

Invited speakers by thematic session:

Evening lecture on language and cognition: Ted Gibson (MIT)
Types: Martin Hackl (Pomona), Liina Pylkkänen (NYU), comments: Bart
Geurts (Nijmegen)
Negation: Barbara Kaup (TU Berlin), Andrea Gualmini (Utrecht),
comments: Ira Noveck (ICS Lyon)
Implicatures: Napoleon Katsos (Cambridge), Julie Sedivy (Brown),
comments: Ted Gibson (MIT)
Semantics-pragmatics boundary: Reinhard Blutner (Amsterdam), tba.,
comments: Richard Breheny (UCL)

Important Dates:

August 31st, 2007 Abstract Submission Deadline
Abstracts should be one-page plus an additional page for examples,
graphs, tables, and references. We are using an electronic abstract
submission system.  Please follow the instructions at

http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/xprag/submission.html

September 29th, 2007 Abstract review process complete

December 13th, 6 pm: Evening lecture by Ted Gibson (MIT) on language
and cognition location: Berlin, Germany, Schuetzenstr. 18, new
building of ZAS (near Checkpoint Charlie)

December 14-16th, 2007: Main Conference, 9 a.m. till 6:30 pm
location: Berlin, Germany, Unter den Linden 6, main building of
Humboldt University

Organizers: Uli Sauerland (ZAS, Berlin), Anton Benz (ZAS, Berlin),
Manfred Krifka (Humboldt University and ZAS, Berlin), Kazuko
Yatsushiro (Humboldt University, Berlin)

Conference Sponsors: German Research Council DFG (Main Conference
Sponsor); ZAS; Humboldt University; European Union FP6, project
CHLaSC (Evening Lecture on December 13th)

Applications are invited for the position of post-doctoral Research Fellow on the AHRC-funded project 'Experimental Investigations of Semantic-Pragmatic Inferences'. Based in the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at University College London, you will carry out experimental research into on-line processes involved in deriving pragmatic implications in language comprehension. You will contribute to all aspects of the project, including data collection, linguistic analysis and dissemination of the results.

For more information, go to:

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/jobs/postdocea.html

He writes:

"As for the schedule, I was hoping to have four thematic blocks...
-Negation
-Quantification
-Semantics-Pragmatics Distinction
-Processing

Those sessions would be 3 hours each, leaving room for about 6-10 submitted papers and a poster session.

The planned location and dates are:

Berlin, Humboldt Universitaet, December 14th to 16th, 2007"

Stay tuned....

How do people understand negated assertions? Negation may function like affirmation if it focuses on the counterfactual situation, i.e., the situation ruled out by the statement. Alternatively, negation could shift focus from the counterfactual to the factual situation referred to in the statement. We tested these hypotheses in a study employing a lexical decision task. Participants read affirmative and negated assertions such as this lawyer is/is not a shark and then made lexical decisions to terms related either to the affirmative or negative meaning (e.g., vicious; gentle). In early stages of comprehension, both the negated and affirmative assertions facilitated the accessibility of affirmative-related terms. After 1000 ms, the affirmative assertions continued to facilitate affirmative-related terms, but the negated assertions no longer did so. These results suggest that negations are initially represented as affirmation. We discuss implications for current theories of negation.

http://pragmatics.osu.edu/

2) It might also be good idea to a link to the LinguistList reviews of the hardbound and softbound edition of Experimental Pragmatics (one by Rick Nouwen and another that I did myself) which are available on the web:

http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?SubID=81425

http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?SubID=54034

all the best for now,

nap

More info:

The departmental speaker tomorrow, Tuesday, 24th October 2006 is Professor Tony Sanford, Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow

Many approaches to language comprehension have assumed that as language is comprehended, it is typically comprehended as fully as possible. For instance, semantic interpretation has been assumed by some to be incremental, with the interpretation of word meaning being as complete as possible. Notwithstanding the observation that much of language is strictly speaking underspecified, there is now evidence from several sources showing that interpretation can be surprisingly shallow. I shall review some of this evidence, including work on failures to detect semantic anomalies, work on the resolution of anaphors, and the impact of varying questions asked of what is being read. Not only is shallow processing commonplace in reading and listening, but the depth of processing can be modulated by a variety of factors, including discourse focus and various forms of sentential complexity. I shall discuss the potential role of processing depth in accounts of discourse comprehension.

E-mail: a.esposito@ucl.ac.uk