Linguistics Seminar - Likely messages and likely forms

Speaker: Hannah Rohde, University of Edinburgh

The study of pragmatics examines the mechanisms underlying speakers' ability to construct meaning in context and hearers' ability to infer meaning beyond what a speaker has explicitly said. These abilities are taken to depend both on the properties of what is said as well as on considerations of what isn't said. In this talk, I present a series of psycholinguistic studies that highlight how the context of alternatives provides knowledge that is brought to bear on pragmatic phenomena, in particular coreference. The studies are framed in terms of Bayesian updating: how do comprehenders estimate the probability of different messages and the likelihood of different forms for expressing those messages?  A number of properties at the levels of events, discourse structure, and utterance formulation help comprehenders estimate upcoming material (probabilities over possible messages); the context of alternative forms is shown to influence how speakers refer and how comprehenders interpret those forms (probabilities over choice of referring expression).  What is most intriguing about the coreference data is the apparent independence of contributions from factors related to message meaning (implicit causality, coherence) and those related to message form (information structure). I also discuss work in two other coreference domains in which the context of alternatives is relevant: the assessment of production costs and the role of focus marking in evoking a set of alternatives.

Time: 4pm, 18th January 2017

Venue: Room G10, Chandler House, 2 Wakefield Street, WC1N 1PF