CFP: 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. We seek contributions underscoring the dialogical nature of contextualist phenomena, or contributions that show how these can be provided with precise analysis in formal dialogue theories or contributions providing  corpus or experimental evidence on such interaction.   We anticipate publication of a selection of papers (after a subsequent open call) as a special issue of the journal Dialogue and Discourse http://dialogue-and-discourse.org  

Submission: A few slots are available for submitted contributions. We invite submissions of abstracts of up to two pages including references, for a 30-minute talk.  

Abstracts should be sent to: [email protected]  

Deadline: June 15, 2012

Notification: June 28, 2012