{"id":5450,"date":"2017-11-07T17:06:54","date_gmt":"2017-11-07T16:06:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xprag.de\/?page_id=5450"},"modified":"2018-05-28T14:47:59","modified_gmt":"2018-05-28T12:47:59","slug":"workshop-implicit-and-explicit-marking-of-discourse-relations-the-comparison-between-causals-vs-conditionals","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.xprag.de\/?page_id=5450","title":{"rendered":"Workshop “Implicit and explicit marking of discourse relations: the comparison between causals vs. conditionals”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Time:<\/strong> May 24-25 2018
\nVenue:<\/strong> Osnabrück University, Building 22, Room 104, Heger-Tor-Wall 14, 49078 Osnabrück (→MAP<\/A>)<\/p>\n

Organizers:<\/strong> Oliver Bott (University of T\u00fcbingen), Mingya Liu (Osnabr\u00fcck University), and Torgrim Solstad (Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics, ZAS Berlin)<\/p>\n

Invited speakers:<\/strong>
\nVera Demberg (Saarland University), Anastasia Giannakidou (University of Chicago), Katrin Schulz (University of Amsterdam)<\/p>\n

Registration:<\/strong> via email to discrel.xprag@gmail.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Call for papers:<\/strong>
\nDiscourse relations (henceforth, DRs) are essential for the production and comprehension of text and dialogue. From a processing perspective, the identification of DRs \u2013 among them causal, conditional and temporal relations \u2013 plays a crucial role in the extraction of textual meaning and the inferences we can derive from it. When producing utterances, we can choose to express DRs explicitly, for example, through dedicated coherence devices such as because<\/i>, if (\u2026 then)<\/i>, and before<\/i>, or leave them implicit, leaving it to the hearer to infer the most likely DR.
\nAn assumption frequently found in the literature is that implicit and explicit DRs are semantically comparable (e.g. Kehler et al. 2008). The inferencing related to implicit DRs, however, poses a challenge for formal modeling of discourse structure, because context imposes different effects of high variability \u2013 among these world knowledge and the epistemic states of the speaker and hearer (van Lambalgen and Hamm 2005). The inferences must also be defeasible because an inferred DR may be incompatible with discourse information encountered later on. What is more, since DRs vary in the degree to which they may be left implicit (Asr and Demberg 2012) \u2013 for instance, concessives are often argued to require explicit marking \u2013, their role in inferential processes may also be assumed to differ.
\nThe proposed workshop aims at identifying factors that contribute to the decision of when a given DR can be left implicit and when it must be marked. We will focus on various kinds of causals, concessives and conditionals which allow for implicit and explicit marking of DRs (with the possible exception of concessives). On the one hand, we aim to identify generally valid inferential and interpretational processes (c.f. e.g. Schulz 2011 and subsequent works) related to DRs by way of examining these DRs. On the other hand, causals and conditionals differ in semantic and pragmatic properties, for instance, in terms of veridicality (Asher and Lascarides 2005, Giannakidou 1998 and subsequent works), and so do causals and concessives (Pearl 2009; Koehne and Demberg 2013). Thus, we also aim to identify the correlation between their properties and the degree to which DRs can be kept implicit. Below are listed a few dimensions that may prove important for the decision to explicitly mark a DR:<\/p>\n