On November 14-15, 2016 the workshop “XPrag meets historical pragmatics” will take place at the University of Cologne. The workshop is organized by XPrag.de coordinator Petra Schumacher from project “InfoPer” and Gerhard Jäger from project “ProComPrag” together with XPrag.de Mercator Fellow Ira Noveck (CNRS Lyon). Deadline for submissions is October 5th. More details and the call for papers can be found here!

There are many contributions by XPrag.de members at Sinn und Bedeutung 21 (SuB 21) to be held at the University of Edinburgh, September 4-6 2016.

On September 4th at 16:40 pm, Joseph P. DeVeaugh-Geiss, Swantje Tönnis, Edgar Onea and Malte Zimmermann from project ExCl will give a talk with the title “That’s not quite it: An experimental investigation of (non-)exhaustivity in it-clefts“. Afterwards, within the same session at 17:20 pm, Marie-Christine Meyer from project SSI will talk about “Contrastive topic and local weakening SIs”
On September 5th at 9:45, Doris Penka from project BiasQ will talk on “One many, many readings“.
On September 6th at 9:00, XPrag.de associate Stefan Hinterwimmer (Cologne) will give a talk on “Two kinds of perspective taking in narrative texts“. At 10:20, XPrag.de Junior Fellow Barbara Tomaszewicz will give a talk together with Alexandra Spalek on “Reading times with complement coercion in Polish: The role of selectional restrictions“. At 11:30, there will be a keynote talk by Sigrid Beck from project ObTrEx with the title “Towards a model of incremental composition“. In the afternoon, at 14:40 Uli Sauerland and Kazuko Yatsushiro from project SSI will talk on “Conjunctive disjunctions: Evidence for the ambiguity theory” followed by a talk by Anton Benz and Nicole Gotzner from project SIgames on “Embedded disjunctions and the best response paradigm” at 15:20.

In addition, there will be several poster presentations by XPrag.de members. Nicole Gotzner from project SIGames will present a poster together with Jacopo Romoli with the title “Testing theories of alternatives with multiple scalar term sentences“. Oliver Bott from project CiC will present a poster on joint work with Torgrim Solstad with the title “Domain knowledge influences the processing of connectives: Eyetracking during reading“. A. Marlijn Meijer and Sophie Repp from project YesNo will present a poster on “Modal subordination of propositions: the Dutch and German modal particles ook and auch and the subjunctive“. Nadine Bade from project ObTrEx will present a poster on “Additives as a window into local exhaustivity implicatures” And, XPrag.de associate Stephanie Solt from ZAS Berlin will present a poster on “Proportional comparatives and relative scales“.

On May 8-10, 2017 the workshop “Non-At-Issue Meaning and Information Structure” will take place at the University of Oslo. The workshop is organized by the XPrag.de members Nadine Bade from project “ObTrEx” and Uli Sauerland from project “SSI” together with Pritty Patel-Grosz and Patrick Grosz from Oslo University. Deadline for submissions is November 15th. More details and the call for papers can be found here!

There will be several poster presentations by XPrag.de members at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL 2016) in London, UK, August 17-20, 2016.
At the poster session on Thursday, August 18, 3:00 – 5:00 pm in Jeffery and Elvin Halls, Anne Wienholz, Derya Nuhbalaoglu, Nivedita Mani and Markus Steinbach from project SignRef will present a poster on “How do signers process spatial anaphora? – An ERP analysis of German Sign Language”. Their abstract can be found here.
At the poster session on Friday, August 19, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm in Jeffery and Elvin Halls, XPrag.de Junior Fellow Maria Spyhcalska will present joint work with Viviana Haase, Jarmo Kontinen and Markus Werning on “Processing affirmation and negation in contexts with unique or multiple alternatives”. The abstract can be found here.
At the poster session on Friday afternoon at 5:30 – 7:30 pm, also in Jeffery and Elvin Halls, Maria Richter, Lu Zhang, Choonkuy Lee, Barbara Höhle and Isabell Wartenburger from project CoGCI will present their poster with the title “I spy with my little eye: ERP signatures of perspective taking in referential communication”. Please find the abstract here.

XPrag.de Junior Fellow Maria Spychalska from project “InfoPer” will give a talk together with Viviana Haase, Jarmo Kontinen and Markus Werning at the 24th annual meeting of the European Society of Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP 2016), taking place in St Andrews, Scotland from August 10th – 13th 2016.
They will talk on “Processing affirmation and negation in contexts with unique or multiple alternatives”.

Abstract:
Negative sentences have been claimed to be more complex and therefore harder to process than affirmative ones. This observation raises the question of how negated concepts are represented and how negation is integrated into the sentence meaning. In our EEG – experiment we addressed the question of whether the processing of affirmation and negation is facilitated in such cases where the context offers a unique referent relative to those cases where the context offers multiple referents. We used a sentence – picture – verification paradigm and measured the event-related potentials to answer this question.
Our results show that it is harder to process sentences in contexts with multiple alternatives than those occurring in contexts with a unique referent, independently of the polarity of the sentence. Additionally, we observed a sustained positivity effect for the negative compared to the affirmative conditions, which indicates a possible reanalysis mechanisms related to the processing of negation.

There are several talks by members from project “ProComPrag” at the THE 38th ANNUAL MEETING OF THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE SOCIETY (CogSci 2016) to be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday, August 10 – Saturday August 13, 2016.
On August 11th, at 11:45-12:10pm Michael Franke, Anthea Schoeller and Judith Degen will give a talk together with Fabian Dablander, Erin Bennett, Michael Tessler, Justine Kao and Noah Goodman. The title is “What does the crowd believe? A hierarchical approach to estimating subjective beliefs from empirical data.”
On August 12th, at 2:55-3:20pm Michael Franke will give a talk together with Michele Herbstritt (Tübingen University). The title of the talk is “Definitely maybe and possibly even probably: efficient communication of higher-order uncertainty”.
On August 13th, Michael Franke will give a third talk together with Thomas Brochhagen and Robert van Rooij (both ILLC) on “Learning biases may prevent lexicalization of pragmatic inferences: a case study combining iterated (Bayesian) learning and functional selection”.

The 7th biannual Experimental Pragmatics Conference will take place from June 21-23, 2017 in Cologne, Germany under the auspices of the DFG Special Priority Program „XPrag.de: New pragmatic theories based on experimental evidence“ (www.xprag.de).

The Experimental Pragmatics series is a biannual conferences that aims at fostering interaction between linguistic, psychological, neuroscientific and philosophical approaches to utterance interpretation. Previous conferences in this series were held in Cambridge (2005), Berlin (2007), Lyon (2009), Barcelona (2011), Utrecht (2013), and Chicago (2015).

Invited speakers:
Kathryn Davidson, Harvard University, Boston
Bruno Galantucci, Yeshiva University, New York City
Mikhail Kissine, Université libre de Bruxelles
Natalie Sebanz, Central European University, Budapest

We invite submissions of abstracts for oral or poster presentations on any topic in experimental pragmatics. The abstract submission site will open later in the year. The submission deadline is February 15, 2017. We expect to make notifications of acceptance by mid-March.

More info at http://xprag2017.uni-koeln.de/.

Local organizers:
Petra B. Schumacher, Cologne
Hanna Weiland-Breckle, Cologne

XPrag.de participates in the “Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften 2016” in Berlin. There will be talks and experiments for visitors. We will also show our videos on Experimental Pragmatics in general as well as in German Sign Language in particular. You find us at the Humboldt University, main building on the 1st floor! See you there!

XPrag.de member Marie-Christine Meyer from project “SSI” at ZAS Berlin has organized together with Guillermo Del Pinal and Daniel Rothschild (UCL) a workshop on Dynamic Semantics to take place on 30-31 May 2016 at ZAS Berlin.

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!