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Pragmatics Graduate Seminar - Diana Mazzarella

12 February 2020, 4:00 pm–6:00 pm

Graduate seminar series on pragmatics

Pragmatics Graduate Seminar (sponsored by LAHP) seminar on "Speakers’ commitment to their utterance content and hearers’ epistemic vigilance in accepting that content.”

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Organiser

Nausicaa Pouscoulous

Location

G15
Chandler House
2 Wakefield street
London
WC1N 1PF
United Kingdom

It is widely assumed that implicit communication enables a risky message to be conveyed while being deniable, disavowable, by its sender (Fricker, 2012; Pinker, 2007). For this reason, implicit communication is typically assumed to be less committal than explicit communication. However, there are different ways in which speakers can craft their utterances and leave a risky content unstated.  For instance, a speaker can either implicate it or presuppose it. Little is known of how these distinct levels of meaning affect the speaker’s liability and perceived blameworthiness. 

I will present a series of experimental studies investigating whether commitment attribution varies as a function of the way in which a message is conveyed and discuss their implications for the study of the strategic advantages of implicit communication, as well as for the debate about what levels of meaning feature in the comprehension process. 

 

About the Speaker

Diana Mazzarella

at Université de Neuchâtel