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.

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.....

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....

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