XPrag.de coordinator Uli Sauerland from ZAS Berlin is invited speaker at the workshop “Questions and Disjunctions: Syntax, Semantics, Typology” which will take place at the University of Vienna on 1-2 October 2015. Uli will talk today at 10:30 a.m. on “The Strength of Disjunction”.

XPrag.de member Andreea Nicolae from project “SSI” will give a further talk at the “Göttingen Spirit Summer School on Negation”, namely on “Simple Disjunction PPIs – A Case for Obligatory Epistemic Inferences” on Saturday, September 19th at 11 a.m. The abstract can be found here!

XPrag.de member Andreea Nicolae from project “SSI” will give a talk together with Anamaria Falaus (Nantes) on “An Exhaustification Account of Strict Negative Concord” at the “Göttingen Spirit Summer School on Negation” today at 3:15 p.m. The abstract can be found here!

Several XPrag.de members will present at the “Sinn und Bedeutung 20″ conference, to be held at Tübingen University, September 9-12, 2015.

On Wednesday September 9th, there will be two talks at the special workshop on “Experimental Methodology in Semantics and Pragmatics”. Thomas Weskott (ProProCon) will talk on “Using Acceptability Judgments to Access Semantic Preferences” at 9:20 p.m.. XPrag.de associate Stefan Hinterwimmer (U Cologne) will talk together with Andreas Brocher on “An Experimental Investigation of the Binding Options of Demonstrative Pronouns” at 11 a.m.
Maribel Romero (BiasQ) will talk together with Andreas Walker at the main session on “Counterfactual Donkeys: A Strict Conditional Analysis” at 4:10 p.m.

At the Postersession on Wednesday (5:30-7:30), Michael Franke and Anthea Schöller (ProComPrag) will present a poster on “/few/ and /many/: A data-driven computational model to test a simple semantic idea”. Andreea Nicolae and Uli Sauerland (SSI) will present a poster on “Disambiguation and Priming: The Effect of Equivalence”.

On Thursday September 10th, there will be a special half-day session celebrating 20 years of ‘Sinn und Bedeutung’, and to honour Arnim von Stechow and his contribution to the field of semantics, entitled “Semantic Theory Evolves Continuously”.
Sigrid Beck (ObTrEx) is invited speaker. She will give her talk at 2:15 p.m. Uli Sauerland (SSI) will present a poster on “Stechowian Decomposition at the Speech Act Level”

On Friday September 11th, Nadine Bade and Sonja Tiemann (ObTrEx) will talk on “Obligatory triggers under negation” at 4:30 p.m.
XPrag.de associate Stephanie Solt (ZAS) will present a poster on “The subjectivity of gradable adjectives and the absolute/relative distinction”.

On Saturday September 12th, at 12:20 p.m. Uli Sauerland will close the conference as invited speaker.

XPrag.de members Oliver Bott and Sonja Tiemann are organizing together with Robin Hörnig and Janina Radó (Uni Tübingen) the workshop “Experimental Methodology in Semantics and Pragmatics” at Sinn und Bedeutung 20 to take place at University of Tübingen on Wednesday, September 9, 2015. The program can be found here!

XPrag.de members Nicole Gotzner and Anton Benz from project SIGames and colleagues will present two posters at the conference AMLaP 2015 (Architectures and mechanisms for Language Processing), to take place at the University of Malta September 3-5th, 2015. There will also be a talk by XPrag.de associate Jack Tomlinson.

Posters:

• Thursday September 3, 2015, 12:20-14:20
  Nicole Gotzner & Anton Benz: “The best response paradigm: A new paradigm to test implicit meaning”
• Saturday September 5, 2015, 12:20-14:20
  Nicole Gotzner, David Barner (UCSD) & Stephen Crain (Macquarie University): “4-5 year olds exhaustify disjunctive statements”

Talks:

• Saturday 5, 2015, 15:50 – 17:10
  John Michael Tomlinson, Jr. and Camilo Rodríguez-Ronderos: “Ignorant before exhaustive: Mouse-tracking inferences from under-informative partial answers”

XPrag.de coordinator Petra Schumacher from project InfoPer in Köln is one of the organizers of a thematic workshop entitled “Prominence in Pragmatics” to take place on September 2nd at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in Leiden, 2-5 September, 2015.

Please find the program here!

XPrag.de member Judith Degen from project “ProComPrag” is invited speaker at the workshop “Bridging Logical and Probabilistic Approaches to Language and Cognition” at ESSLLI 2015. The workshop will take place 3-7 August 2015, in Barcelona, Spain. Judith will talk on August, 7th at 11 a.m. on “Wonky Worlds: Modeling Prior Beliefs and Common Ground in Pragmatic Inference”.

Abstract: World knowledge enters into pragmatic utterance interpretation in complex ways and may be defeasible in light of speakers’ utterances. While effects of world knowledge on syntactic and semantic processing are well-established, there is to date a surprising lack of systematic investigation into the role of world knowledge in pragmatics. Here, we show that a state-of-the-art Bayesian model of pragmatic interpretation within the Rational Speech Act framework greatly overestimates the influence of world knowledge on the interpretation of utterances like Some of the marbles sank. We extend the model to capture the idea that listeners have uncertainty about the background knowledge the speaker is bringing to the utterance situation – and in effect., about the beliefs assumed to be in common ground. This extension greatly improves model predictions of listeners’ interpretation and also makes good qualitative predictions about listeners’ judgments of how ‘normal’ the world is in light of a speaker’s statement. We discuss alternatives to assuming malleable prior beliefs, including assuming that the speaker is uncooperative and that the speaker could have remained silent, and show for both that they are not the source of the compressed effect of world knowledge on utterance interpretation. We argue that this case study is an excellent demonstration of how combining behavioral experimentation and probabilistic computational modeling allows for gaining otherwise inaccessible insights into the interplay between language and cognition.

Judith Degen and Michael Franke from project “ProComPrag” will give an advanced course on “Probabilistic and experimental pragmatics” at ESSLLI 2015 at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, August 3-7, 2015.