Dialogue with Contextualism

Context is a key component in a variety of phenomena that have been used to argue pro and con various versions of contextualism, including unsaturated predicates, domain selection, metonymy, knowledge attributions, ethical judgements, and gradable adjectives. More recently there has been significant interest in phenomena involving overt discussion between interlocutors, for instance with respect to personal taste predicates and epistemic modals. These debates have mostly taken place at some remove from work in the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue, where theories such as SDRT, KoS, and PTT provide detailed, formal notions of conversational context (typically explicated in terms of coupled information states of the interlocutors), discussion, and metacommunicative interaction. All this grounded in evidence from conversational corpora such as the British National Corpus, Switchboard, Trains etc. This one day workshop seeks to bridge this divide.

Programme   10-11 Robin Cooper (Gothenburg University)  Judgement, truth and probability: taste, (dis)agreement, and compromise   coffee   11:20-12:10 Inés Crespo and Raquel Fernández  (University of Amsterdam) Disagreement, meaning, and affect   12:10-13 Isidora Stojanovic (Institute Jean Nicod, ENS) Disagreement and retraction in dialogue   Lunch   14-14:50 Stanley Peters (Stanford University) Context, Co-text, and Environment in Conversation   14:50-15:40 Staffan Larsson (Gothenburg University) Contextualism and semantic coordination   coffee   16-16:50 Jonathan Ginzburg (Universite Paris-Diderot) Minimalism v. Contextualism: a dialogical evaluation       Attendance is free, but please email seinedial@gmail.com if you wish to attend.

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