The program of the workshop “The pragmatics of quantifiers: implicature and presupposition – experiment and theory” to take place from June 6-7th, 2018, at ZAS Berlin is online now. Details can be found here!

There will be several presentations by XPrag.de members at The 28th Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) conference, which will take place on May 18-20, 2018 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

XPrag.de coordinator Uli Sauerland (ZAS Berlin) will give a talk on Saturday, May 19th at 9 a.m. on “The Thought Uniqueness Hypothesis”.

Furthermore there will be four poster presentations by XPrag.de members.

On Friday, May 18th at the Poster session 2 (4:00-5:30), XPrag.de members Nicole Gotzner (SiGames, Berlin), Stephanie Solt (associate, ZAS Berlin) and Anton Benz (SiGames, Berlin) will present a poster on “Scalar implicature and negative strengthening in different types of gradable adjectives”

On Saturday, May 19th at the Poster session 3 (11:30-1:00), Nicole Gotzner will present a second poster together with Jacopo Romoli (Ulster) and Paolo Santorio (San Diego) on “More free choice and more inclusion: An experimental investigation of free choice in non-monotonic environments”

On Saturday, May 19th at the Poster session 4 (4:00-5:30), XPrag.de associate Stephanie Solt will present a second poster together with Jon Stevens (Ohio) on “Some three students: Towards a unified account of ‘some’”. A further poster will be presented by XPrag.de member Carla Bombi (ExQ, Potsdam) on “Definiteness in Akan (Kwa): familiarity and uniqueness revisited”.

On May 8th, XPrag.de PhD-student Carla Bombi from project “ExQ” in Potsdam will present joint work with Lea Fricke (Graz), Edgar Onea (Graz) and Malte Zimmermann (Potsdam) in the SynSem colloquium. The title of the talk is “Exhaustivity in questions: Two pilot studies on interrogatives embedded under German wissen (know)”

Time and venue: 8th May 2018, 16.15 – 17.45; Potsdam Golm, building 14, room 0.32

Abstract
The talk is concerned with sentences such as (1), containing an interrogative clause embedded under the factive “know”:
(1) Johannes knows which students failed.
The semantic literature disagrees as to what (1) means, concretely how much Johannes needs to know for (1) to be true: does he have to know of every student that failed that she failed? Or is partial knowledge sufficient? Is knowledge about the set of people who didn’t fail also required? As a result of this debate, a number of so-called “exhaustivity levels” have been posited in the literature, which capture the different conceivable readings of (1). Although there is a consensus that some notion of exhaustivity/completeness is required in this type of sentences, its exact source and the conditions under which it arises are still unclear. Elucidating the readings that are possible and as well as their sources is crucial for understanding the semantics of
(embedded) questions.
In this talk, we present the results of two pilot studies on German interrogatives embedded under “wissen” (“know”). In the first study, the availability of the different “exhaustivity levels” was tested for sentences such as (1) in a truth value judgement task. The second study investigates the sources of exhaustivity in (1). The hypothesis entertained is that two of the readings that have been posited for (1) (the so-called strongly exhaustive and intermediate exhaustive readings) arise as the result of a de re / de dicto ambiguity, i.e. a clash between the knowledege of the reporter of the sentence and the knowledge of the subject (“Johannes” in (1)).

The program of the workshop “Implicit and explicit marking of discourse relations: the comparison between causals vs. conditionals” to take place from May 24th to May 25th, 2018 at the University of Osnabrück is online now. Details can be found here!

On May 8th, Marie-Christine Meyer from project LISI at ZAS Berlin will give a talk at the Oberseminar English Linguistics (Syntax–Semantics). The title of the talk is “Towards a compositional semantics for L+H*LH%”

Abstract
In this talk I will work towards a compositional semantics of complex intonational structures involving a contrastive pitch accent L+H* and a final fall or rise (LL% or LH%). I will show how the semantic composition of L+H* with LX% offers a unifying new perspective on constructions traditionally described as “meta-linguistic negation”, “contrastive negation” and “contrastive focus”.

On July 11-13, 2018 the workshop “Scalar Implicatures: Formal and Experimental Exploration” will take place at the University of Siena, Italy. The workshop is organized by XPrag.de associate Salvatore Pistoia-Reda (ZAS Berlin, U Siena), XPrag.de coordinator Uli Sauerland (ZAS Berlin), XPrag.de associate Filippo Domaneschi (U Genoa for XPRAG.it) and Valentina Bianchi (U Siena). The new deadline for submissions is May 15th, 2018. More details and the call for papers can be found here!

On September 26-28, 2018, the workshop “Computational Models of Language Generation and Processing in Pragmatics” will take place at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. The workshop is organized by the XPrag.de members Anton Benz (SiGames, ZAS Berlin), Michael Franke (Pro^3, Tübingen), Matthias Unterhuber and Markus Werning (both BayesPrag@EEG, Bochum) together with Christoph Hesse (ZAS Berlin) and Ralf Klabunde (Bochum). Deadline for submissions is June 1st, 2018! Please find the call for papers and more details here.