The workshop “Rationality, Probability, and Pragmatics”, organized by the XPrag.de projects “SSI”, “SIGames” and “ProComPrag” together with Niki Pfeifer (München) from the associated project “Coherence-based probability logic: Rationality under uncertainty” (SPP 1516) to be held at ZAS Berlin starts on Wednesday, May 25th. The program has slightly changed. Please register today! More details can be found here!

XPrag.de Junior Fellow Barbara Tomaszewicz from project “InfoPer” will give a talk together with Katja Jasinskaja (U Cologne) at the “Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 25” conference to be held at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, 13-15 May, 2016. They will talk on “Dissociating the scalarity and additivity of EVEN – the case of “čak” and “čak i” in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS)”.

The program of the workshop “Rationality, Probability, and Pragmatics”, organized by the XPrag.de projects “SSI”, “SIGames” and “ProComPrag” together with Niki Pfeifer (München) from the associated project “Coherence-based probability logic: Rationality under uncertainty” (SPP 1516) is online now. The workshop will be held at ZAS Berlin on May 25th-27th, 2016. More details can be found here!

XPrag.de member Pia Knoeferle from project “FoTeRo” will give a talk at the Dahlem Lectures in Linguistics at FU Berlin on Tuesday, 19th April 2016 at 4:30pm in room JK 31/125 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45). The title of her talk is “Emotional facial priming of language comprehension across the lifespan”

Abstract
When considering ‘context’ in language processing research, it may be tempting to view context as a homogeneous entity. However, when considering the contextual cues in our environment (such as actions, another speaker’s gaze or smile), then we may want to ask whether treating these as just ‘context’ is the right approach. In addition to differences in the types of cues, language users of different ages may recruit these cues differently. In a series of visual-world eye-tracking studies, we investigated the effects of facial emotions and of action depictions on spoken language comprehension in 5-year olds, young, and older adults. The action depictions modulated comprehension in all three age groups in a qualitatively similar manner, albeit with different time courses. Emotional facial priming affected the young and older adults’ comprehension (in a qualitatively different manner depending on valence). Moreover, the type of prime face (e.g., schematic faces such as smileys vs. natural faces) mattered, with somewhat more pronounced effects of natural faces than for smileys. These findings show for the first time that different non-linguistic cues, i.e., direct referential cues such as depicted actions and more indirect social cues such as emotional facial expressions are integrated into situated language processing to different degrees. Crucially, the time course and strength of the integration of these cues varies as a function of age.

XPrag.de member Joseph P. DeVeaugh-Geiss from project “ExCl” at Potsdam University will give a talk at the University of Konstanz on Thursday, April 14th at 1.30pm in room M901. His talk is entitled “That’s not quite it: An experimental investigation of (non-)exhaustivity in it-clefts”.

Abstract: We present an empirical study on the source and status of exhaustivity inferences in it-clefts compared to definite descriptions (pseudoclefts with an identity statement), exclusives, and focus constructions in German. Our study uses a novel mouse-driven picture-verification task in which the incremental updating of the context allows one to determine at which point participants take exhaustivity into consideration. This method allows us to address systematically the following research questions: Is cleft exhaustivity at-issue or not-at-issue? Is it semantic or pragmatic? Our results are compatible with a parallel analysis of clefts and definite descriptions (see Percus 1997, Büring & Kriz 2013; cf. Deveaugh-Geiss et al. 2015), albeit one in which exhaustivity is a not-at-issue pragmatic inference in both constructions (Heim 1982, Ludlow & Segal 2004 for definites; Horn 1981, 2014 for clefts). In particular, we claim that clefts and definite descriptions (specifically the compound definite ‘derjenige’) only encode an anaphoric existence presupposition and uniqueness is derived from Gricean reasoning: in German both sentence types are unambiguously marked as either singular or plural (cf. English), and by choosing singular the speaker implicates uniqueness. Crucially, our pragmatic account does not rely on the exclusion of focus alternatives.

The program of the workshop “Disjunction Days: Theoretical and experimental perspectives on the semantics and pragmatics of disjunction”, organized by the XPrag.de projects “SSI” (ZAS Berlin), “SIGames” (ZAS Berlin) and “BiasQ” (Universität Konstanz) to be held at ZAS Berlin from June 2-3, 2016 is online now. Details can be found here!

The program of the workshop on “The role of pragmatic factors in child language processing”, organized by the XPrag.de projects “FoTeRo” (HU Berlin, U Bielefeld) and “CoGCI” (U Potsdam) to be held at Humboldt University, Berlin from May 19-20, 2016 is online now. Details can be found here!