Workshop “Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Presuppositions”

Organizers:
Filippo Domaneschi (University of Genoa – EXPRESS), Uli Sauerland (ZAS Berlin – XPrag.de project SSI), Edgar Onea (Courant Research Centre “Text Structures”, Junior Research Group “Theoretical linguistics”, University of Göttingen, XPrag.de project ExCl)

Time and venue:
3-5 March 2017 at University of Genoa, Genoa (Italy)

Invited speaker:
Florian Schwarz (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Nadine Bade (Universität Tübingen, DE)

Program

Aim of the workshop:
Presuppositions are a major focus of current research in semantics and pragmatics, especially so under the traditional broad understanding of presupposition encompassing all types of content that can project from the scope of semantic operators. Much recent work on presupposition has shown how experimental results can shed light on current theoretical debates (e.g. Chemla, 2009; Chemla & Schenker; Schwartz & Tiemann, 2016; Domaneschi et al., 2014). Nevertheless many old theoretical debates and empirical problems remain still open.
The goal of this workshop is to provide an overview of the state of the art in Experimental Pragmatics on the theoretical and experimental approaches to presuppositions. The ideal contribution is one that advances presuppositions on the basis of experimental data, but also contributions on the experimental methodology for testing presuppositions and those making novel theoretical proposals are welcome.

Topics include but are not limited to the following:

  • Presuppositions and context
  • Presupposition triggers
  • Informative presupposition
  • Presupposition accommodation
  • The presupposition projection problem
  • Presuppositions in Dynamic Semantics
  • The presupposition/implicature distinction.