CFP: Roots of Pragmasemantics

Linguists, logicians, philosophers, psychologists, and interested researchers from other areas are cordially invited to join the 16th Workshop on the Roots of Pragmasemantics to be held on the top of the Szrenica mountain in the Giant Mountains on the border of Poland and the Czech Republic on 20-23 February 2015.

The two main themes of this year's convention are (1) "Mental Representation of Semantic and Pragmatic Lexical Knowledge" and (2) "The Role of Linguistics in the Cognitive Sciences". The first theme will be taking up recent discussions of mental representation in linguistics (e.g., frames), computational linguistics (e.g., distributional knowledge combined with other representation), and cognitive science (e.g., embodied cognition), and hopes for contributions from different disciplinary perspectives. Given the strong methodological and theoretical influence by other disciplines on linguistics, our second theme will address the current state and future of linguistics: Are there properly linguistic objects of investigation? What contributions from linguistics can the cognitive sciences hope for? We especially invite submissions related to these topics but also welcome contributions relevant to any of the more classical subjects of this workshop series. Experimental as well as theoretical approaches are welcome. We in particular encourage the presentation of innovative ideas, even if still in need of later refinement.

Confirmed invited speakers are Jaroslav Peregrin (Charles University Prague), Judith Tonhauser (Ohio State University, with 97% certainty), Berit Gehrke (CNRS / Paris Diderot) and Reinhard Blutner (retired, University of Amsterdam).

We invite submission of blind abstracts of no longer than 250 words in PDF, to be sent to [email protected].

Relevant topics for the themes include:

    Mental representation of lexical knowledge
    Embodied Cognition and the role of sensorimotor activation in language
    processing
    Interrelations between linguistics and (other) cognitive sciences
    Objects of investigation for linguistics

And more traditional Szklarska Poreba themes:

    coordination on meaning
    inference in natural language
    experimental semantics and pragmatics
    Bayesian models of interpretation
    quantum cognition and language
    grammaticalisation and other approaches to diachrony
    language typology and semantics/pragmatics
    game theoretical pragmatics
    formal models of language acquisition
    explicature and implicature
    The architecture of the syntax/semantics interface
    Licensing of polarity elements, quantification, etc.
    The evolution of communication and language
    Optimality theory

Dates

Deadline for abstracts: 5 January
Decision: 15 January
Workshop: 20-23 February


Organizers and contact details

Workshop Director: Susanna Melkonian (HHU Düsseldorf), smelkonian (at) phil (dot) uni-duesseldorf (dot) de.

Program Director: Alexandra Redmann (HHU Düsseldorf), a (dot) redmann (at) phil (dot) uni-duesseldorf (dot) de.

For the standing committee: Henk Zeevat (ILLC, University of Amsterdam),
henk (dot) zeevat (at) uva (dot) nl.

For queries and abstracts: workshop email: [email protected]

Standing Committee

Justyna Grudzińska (Warszawa)
Berit Gehrke (CNRS / Paris Diderot)
Anton Benz (ZAS Berlin, chair)
Edgar Onea (University of Goettingen)
Lotte Hogeweg (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Nina Gierasimczuk (lLLC, Amsterdam)

Consultants

Henk Zeevat (ILLC, Amsterdam)
Reinhard Blutner (retired, University of Amsterdam)