Presentation

Workshop Stanford - ENS - Université Paris 7

New Advances in Formal Pragmatics:

From Scalar Implicatures to Social Meaning

March 28-29, 2017

École normale supérieure, 29, rue d'Ulm 75005 Paris. Salle Langevin.

This two-day workshop is devoted the scientific study of pragmatic meaning; that is, the meaning of linguistic expressions that arises through their use in a discourse context, with a particular focus on how to develop formal and computational models of this context- dependent meaning. The questions of how pragmatic meaning is computed and what role the grammar plays in this computation are longstanding, foundational problems in linguistics and related fields. Furthermore, the results of recent research undertaken by scholars in France (particularly in Paris) and in the United States (particularly at Stanford) have given rise to exciting new ideas concerning the properties of appropriate formal models of pragmatic meaning the full range of empirical data upon which these models should be based.

In order to foster interaction between American and French researchers and to share these new ideas, we therefore propose to bring together specialists from Paris, Stanford, and other parts of North America and Europe working at the intersection of linguistics, psychology, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology. The overall goal of the workshop is to create a new Franco-American working group devoted to building an empirically well-founded, mathematically sound, and cognitively realistic theory of the grammatical, cognitive, and social processes that underlie natural language use and understanding.