Full Title: Workshop: Background Beliefs in the Construction of Meaning

Date: 09-Jan-2025 - 10-Jan-2025
Location: Tübingen, Germany
Contact Person: Asya Achimova
Meeting Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Philosophy of Language; Pragmatics; Semantics; Sociolinguistics

Call Deadline: 10-Nov-2024

Meeting Description:

Organizers: Asya Achimova (University of Tübingen), Elin McCready (Aoyama Gakuin University), Dan Harris (Hunter College, CUNY)
Date: January 9 - 10, 2025

Emmy Noether research group “Socially-relevant pragmatic inference” (University of Tübingen) is organizing a kick-off workshop “Background beliefs in the construction of meaning”.

The process of utterance interpretation depends not only on the linguistic properties of the utterance, but also on the background beliefs of the listener, her ideology, and perspective. In this workshop, we ask how these factors affect the construction of meaning.

We bring together formal semantics, philosophy of language, psycholinguistics, and computational modeling to ask what types of utterances depend on background beliefs and perspectives in their interpretation, how background beliefs can be integrated in the process of drawing pragmatic inferences, what types of beliefs matter for the interpretation of utterances, and how background beliefs relate to the linguistic notions of context and common ground.

Invited speakers:

Jennifer Saul (University of Waterloo)
Mandy Simons (Carnegie Mellon University)
Judith Tonhauser (University of Stuttgart)
Greg Scontras (University of California, Irvine)
Natasha Korotkova (University College Utrecht)
Paula Rubio-Fernández (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)
Peter van Elswyk (Northwestern University)

Conference fee: free

Registration: please send an email to [email protected] by January 3, 2025 if you are planning to attend the workshop.

Call for Papers:

We are inviting submissions for 15-minute oral presentations or posters. Please submit an anonymous 500-word abstract as a pdf file to [email protected] by November 10, 2024. Please indicate in your submission the preferred presentation format.

Notification of acceptance: December 10, 2024