Organizers:
Anton Benz (SiGames, ZAS), Oliver Bott (CiC, Tübingen), Mingya Liu (SPOCC, Osnabrück), Torgrim Solstad (ZAS Berlin)
Time and venue:
September 25-26, 2019 at ZAS Berlin, Room 403, 4th floor, (→Map)
How to get to ZAS!
Invited speakers:
Katja Jasinskaja (Köln), Arndt Riester (Köln), and Hannah Rohde (Edinburgh).
+++ Unfortunately, Hannah Rohdes’s talk had to be canceled. +++
Please register via e-mail to discrel2019@leibniz-zas.de by September, 23rd at the latest.
Program
Wednesday, 25.09.2019| 14:50-15:00 | Welcome |
| 15:00-16:00 | Katja Jasinskaja Under what? Speaker's intention as the target of specification |
| 16:00-16:30 | coffee break |
| 16:30-17:15 | Jet Hoek, Sandrine Zufferey, Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul & Ted J.M. Sanders The role of segment-internal elements in the signaling of coherence relations (Abstract) |
| 17:15-18:00 | Mingya Liu Semantic causality hidden in Mandarin counterfactual conditionals | 19:00- | Dinner at Café Nö Address: Glinkastraße 23, 10117 Berlin |
| 10:00-11:00 | Arndt Riester Topic management in question-based discourse structure (Abstract) |
| 11:00-11:30 | coffee break |
| 11:30-12:15 | Ludivine Crible Connective ambiguity and compensation by discourse signals in speech and writing (Abstract) |
| 12:15-13:00 | Markus Egg & Debopam Das Caught in the middle with you: Between under- and overspecification of discourse relations |
| 13:00-14:30 | lunch break |
| 14:30-15:15 | Yipu Wei, Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul & Ted Sanders How subjectivity is expressed in discourse: Evidence from collocation analyses (Abstract) |
| 15:15-16:00 | Manfred Stede obwohl/although: Moving beyond concession |
| 16:00-16:30 | Concluding remarks/discussion |
| 19:00- | Join the DETEC 2019 pre-conference gathering (if you want; venue to be announced) |
Description:
This workshop is a follow-up of the XPrag.de-Workshop “Implicit and explicit marking of discourse relations” on May 24-25, 2018 at Osnabrück University with a related, but different focus.
Most of the literature and tools on discourse relations (DRs) focus on information-exchanging situations, where speaker and hearer share communicative goals. Therefore, the identification of a DR in the absence of explicit marking presupposes that there is one DR intended by the cooperative speaker. One possible reason for the lack of marking is to obey the economy principle, e.g. when discourse context makes it clear which DR is meant. However, the assumption of a specific, implicit DR is questionable. For example, when two events follow each other temporally, speakers may still be uncertain whether one is the cause for the other, and thus, opt for not using because to avoid over-commitment. Another point in case would be strategic situations in which speakers would choose to remain vague by avoiding the explicit marking of DRs or by using markers that are notoriously underspecified, such as and. This is important for DR annotations since the information of the speaker’s epistemic state is hard to detect from written texts. On the other hand, DRs may also be multiply marked (see Das & Taboada 2017). Such overspecification also challenges the economy principle, and the rationality behind it needs further investigation. The workshop aims at identifying factors that contribute to the decision of violating economy principles in the marking of DRs, in particular over- vs. underspecification. We will focus on various kinds of DRs that allow both explicit and implicit marking such as conditionals and causals. We particularly encourage contributions that take a production perspective in cooperative vs. strategic situations to shed light on the gaps and overlaps between production and comprehension. Below are listed a few dimensions which may prove important for the decision to underspecify, specify, or over-specify a DR:
- Linguistic complexity of DRs
- Predictability of a DR from context
- Cognitive costs/resources for inferring a DR
- Pragmatic constraints (e.g. avoidance of ambiguity or avoidance of falsity)
- Strategic communication: the strategic speaker may opt for implicit DR marking to foster e.g. plausible deniability
- Availability of fast and automatic mechanisms generating DR predictions
- Interlocutors’ familiarity with the current (local) discourse topic
Please register via e-mail to discrel2019@leibniz-zas.de by September, 23rd at the latest.
Co-located Event
We would like to call your attention to the DETEC conference on September 27-28, 2019, directly following this workshop, also to be held at ZAS (Berlin):
”Discourse Expectations: Theoretical, Experimental, and Computational Perspectives” (DETEC2019) with Elsi Kaiser, Alex Lascarides and Mante Nieuwland as invited speakers. For further information, visit:
http://www.leibniz-zas.de/workshop_detec2019.html