Several XPrag.de members will present at the “II WORKSHOP AT THE SEMANTICS/PRAGMATICS INTERFACE: IMPLICATURES AND PRESUPPOSITIONS” to be held at the University of Siena, March 19-20th, 2015.

On Thursday, the 19th, Andreea Nicolae and Uli Sauerland from project SSI at ZAS Berlin will give a talk on “Strength differences of implicatures”.
On Friday, the 20th, Nicole Gotzner from project SIGames at ZAS Berlin will talk on “Testing the relationship between intonational focus, the activation of alternatives and implicature computation”.

Filippo Domaneschi from XPrag.de project BiasQ in Konstanz organizes together with Salvatore Pistoia Reda (University of Siena) the “II WORKSHOP AT THE SEMANTICS/PRAGMATICS INTERFACE: IMPLICATURES AND PRESUPPOSITIONS” to be held at the University of Siena, March 19-20th, 2015. More details can be found here.

Several XPrag.de members will present at Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 25) to be held at Stanford University, May 15-17, 2015.

Talks by XPag.de members on Saturday, May 16th:

“On the acquisition of simple and complex disjunctions in French and Japanese” (abstract)
Lyn Tieu (ENS), Kazuko Yatsushiro (XPrag.de associate ZAS Berlin), Alexandre Cremers (ENS), Jacopo Romoli (Ulster), Uli Sauerland (project SSI) and Emmanuel Chemla (ENS)

“Semantic values as latent pragmatic parameters: surprising few and many” (abstract)
Michael Franke and Anthea Schoeller (both project ProComPrag)

“Presuppositions in the scope of quantifying expressions: Eye tracking data” (abstract)
Sonja Tiemann (project ObTrEx)

Posters presented by XPrag.de members on Saturday, May 16th:

“The grammar of relative measurement”(abstract)
Dorothy Ahn (Harvard) and Uli Sauerland (project SSI)

“Contradicting (not-)at-issueness in exclusives and clefts: an empirical study” (abstract)
Joseph Deveaugh-Geiss, Anna Boell, Malte Zimmermann and Edgar Onea Gáspár (all project ExCl)

“Bias in commitment space semantics: declarative questions, negated questions, and question tags” (abstract)
Manfred Krifka (project YesNo)

“Surprise-predicates, strong exhaustivity and whether-questions” (abstract)
Maribel Romero (project BiasQ)

“Counterfactual donkeys: A strict conditional analysis” (abstract)
Andreas Walker (Konstanz) and Maribel Romero (project BiasQ)

Several XPrag.de members will present at the 28th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing at University of Southern California on March 19-21, 2015.

On Friday, the 20th, Pia Knoeferle from project FoTeRo and XPrag.de Mercator Fellow Jesse Snedeker (Harvard University) will give a talk together with Duygu Özge, Jaklin Kornfilt, Katja Münster and Aylin Küntay on “Comprehension of case in German children: Evidence against a maturational hypothesis” at 4:45 (abstract).

In addition, there are three poster sessions, one on each day of the conference, from 12:45-2:45pm. Here is the list of posters presented by XPrag.de members:

Thursday, 19th:

“A Cost and Information-Based Account of Epistemic ‘must'” (abstract)
Judith Degen (project ProComPrag), Justine Kao, Gregory Scontras and Noah Goodman

“Computation of number agreement in native and nonnative speakers of German” (abstract)
Sol Lago and Claudia Felser (project L2PronRes)

“Implying exhaustivity and ignorance in partial answers” (abstract)
John Michael Tomlinson, Jr. (XPrag.de associate) and Camilo RodriguezRonderos

“When “all” means not all: nonliteral interpretations of universal quantifiers (abstract)
Justine Kao, Judith Degen (project ProComPrag) and Noah Goodman

Friday, 20th:

“Effects of contrastive pitch accents on children’s encoding of discourse” (abstract)
Eun-Kyung Lee and Jesse Snedeker (XPrag.de Mercator Fellow)

“Filler complexity in filler-gap dependencies: Wh-extraction vs. topicalization” (abstract)
Constantin Freitag and Sophie Repp (project YesNo)

“Gaze cue versus recent event preference in spoken sentence comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking” (abstract)
Dato Abashidze and Pia Knoeferle (project FoTeRo)

“Non-sinking marbles are wonky: world knowledge in scalar implicature computation” (abstract)
Judith Degen (project ProComPrag) and Noah Goodman

“The mechanisms underlying different types of (exhaustivity) inferences” (abstract)
Nicole Gotzner (project SIGames), John Michael Tomlinson, Jr. (XPrag.de associate) & Katharina Spalek

“The online application of binding condition C in German pronoun resolution” (abstract)
Janna Drummer, Clare Patterson and Claudia Felser (all project L2PronRes)

Saturday, 21st

“Are all the triangles blue? ERP evidence from German quantifier restriction” (abstract)
Petra Augurzky, Oliver Bott (project CiC), Wolfgang Sternefeld and Rolf Ulrich

“Locality rules out variable binding in coreference resolution” (abstract)
Jens Roeser, Evgeniya Shipova, Shravan Vasishth and Malte Zimmermann (project ExCl)

“On the acquisition and interpretation of container phrases in English” (abstract)
Suzi Lima and Jesse Snedeker (XPrag.de Mercator Fellow)

“Psychological evidence for the ontology of events” (abstract)
Amy Geojo and Jesse Snedeker (XPrag.de Mercator Fellow)

“Whom did you read? – On type clashes and word senses” (abstract)
Petra B. Schumacher and Hanna Weiland-Breckle (both project InfoPer)

On March 11th, we had a fruitful meeting between Lyn and members from XPrag.de. Lyn presented joint work with Kazuko Yatsushiro, Alexandre Cremers, Jacopo Romoli, Uli Sauerland and Emmanuel Chemla on “the acquisition of simple and complex disjunctions in French and Japanese” concluding that children are capable of pragmatic enrichment when alternatives are salient. Afterwards Nicole Gotzner and Anton Benz from project SIGames presented a new experimental paradigm for the investigation of embedded implicatures motivated by game theory.

Did you know that XPrag.de is the first priority program in the history of the German Research Foundation in which the majority of principal investigators are women? Among the 16 participating scientific projects only 4 are headed exclusively by men whereas 5 projects are headed exclusively by women and 7 are headed by a mixed team of female and male principal investigators. Overall, 52% of principal investigators are women.

In XPrag.de there are 8 female post-docs and 2 male post-doc researchers. Approximately the same ratio holds for PhD students: 10 female and 2 male students are doing research for their doctoral thesis in an XPrag.de project.

Adding up all researchers involved in XPrag.de, 65% are women!

At the Annual Meeting of the DGfS in Leipzig, there will be two XPrag.de workshops: the workshop “AG10 – Perspective-taking” organized by XPrag.de project “InfoPer” (Köln) together with XPrag.de associate Stefan Hinterwimmer and the workshop “AG 13 – Proportions and quantities” organized by project “SSI” (ZAS Berlin) together with XPrag.de associate Stephanie Solt. Furthermore, Bettina Braun from project “BiasQ” (Konstanz) co-organized the workshop “AG 6 – The prosody and meaning of (non-)canonical questions across languages”. Beside this, there will be several talks of XPrag.de members in other workshops as well.

Talks of XPrag.de members on March 4th

Hanna Weiland and Petra Schumacher from project “InfoPer” and XPrag.de associate Stefan Hinterwimmer (Köln) will give the introductory talk of their workshop “AG 10 – Perspective taking” at 2 pm.

Uli Sauerland from project “SSI” (ZAS Berlin) will give a talk together with Dorothy Ahn on “Reversal of proportional quantifiers” in AG 13 – Proportions and quantities” at 2 pm.

Thomas Weskott and Anke Holler from project “ProProCon” (Göttingen) will give a talk together with Susanna Salem, titled “Does narrative perspective influence the spatial point of view in readers’ mental representation of a text? A psycholinguistic study on free indirect discourse” in “AG 10 – Perspective taking” at 3:30 pm.

Stavros Skopeteas from project “FoTeRo” (Bielefeld) will talk on “Adjunct order in languages with V-final and V-initial VPs” in “AG 4 – VO-OV: Correlations of head-complement order in grammar and lexicon” at 4:30 pm.

Andreea Nicolae from project “SSI” (ZAS Berlin) will talk on “The positive polarity aspect of weak disjunction in “AG 9: Varieties of positive polarity items” at 5:30 pm.

Talks of XPrag.de members on March 5th

Sigrid Beck from project “ObTrEx”(Tübingen) will give a talk on the “Interpretation of echo-questions” in “AG 6 – The prosody and meaning of (non-)canonical questions across languages” at 12:00.

XPrag.de associate Jack Tomlinson (ZAS Berlin) will talk together with Camilo Rodríguez Ronderos on “Perspective-taking and inference: do speakers alter partial answers as a function of their epistemic states? in “AG 10 – Perspective taking” at 12:00.

Talks of XPrag.de members on March 6th

Barbara Höhle and Isabell Wartenburger from project “CoGCI” (Potsdam) will give a talk together with Lu Zhang and Jan Ries on “Perspective taking and common ground effects on reference resolution in “AG 10 – Perspective taking” at 11:30 am

Barbara Höhle from project “CoGCI” (Potsdam) will give a talk together with Jeannine Schwytay on “The consonant-vowel-asymmetry in early word learning of German” in “AG 7: Universal biases on phonological acquisition and processing” at 1 pm

The deadline for submissions was extended to March 15th! The workshop description and the call for paper can be found here!

As a warm-up to the DGfS Workshop ‘Proportions and Quantities’, organized by Uli Sauerland from XPrag.de project SSI and XPrag.de associate Stephanie Solt, a small mini-workshop will take place at the ZAS on 3. March 14:00-17:30, featuring some of the same speakers. Details can be found here!

On February 10th XPrag.de member Andreea Nicolae of project SSI at ZAS Berlin will give a talk on “Deriving the PPI behavior of weak disjunction” at the “Jerusalem Workshop on Syntax & Semantics: Negation and Polarity”. The program of the workshop can be found here!