Workshop on Contrastiveness in Information Structure

and/or Scalar Implicatures

 

 

July 21-26, 2008

Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

 

A workshop on Contrastiveness in Information Structure and/or Scalar Implicatures

will be held in conjunction with the 18th International Congress of Linguists (CIL 18).

For more information, visit the website (http://www.cil18.org ) or contact the organizer at [email protected].

                          

Organizers:

Chungmin Lee 

Seoul Nat’l University

Email: [email protected]

Cell phone: 82-10-8286-3886

Fax: 82-2-880-1366

Ferenc Kiefer  

Hungarian Academy of Sciences 

Email: [email protected]

 

Invited Speakers

Laurence Horn (Yale)

Robert van Rooy (Amsterdam)

Enric Vallduvi (Pompeu Fabra)

 

Description  

 

It is fairly well established by now that meaning is regarded as representing update potential rather than merely truth conditions, taking a dynamic perspective on semantics and/or pragmatics. Topic – Focus information structure becomesmore complex because of discourse-connected, largely quantificational, contrastiveness; sets of alternatives are involved in Contrastive Topic and Contrastive Focus. Contrastiveness and the range of alternatives must be further explored.

 

At the same time, sets of alternatives are required in the computation of scalar implicatures. What would be the range of relevant or comparable alternatives? Gricean, neo-Gricean, relevance-theoretic or other ‘relevant’? Utterances with Contrastive Topic generate scalar implicatures. How other utterances generate scalar implicatures? Is the exhaustivity operator exh good enough? What would be an adequate representation – pragmatic, semantic or syntactic? How can a game-theoretic approach serve as a new model? What other scales work except Horn’s entailment scales? We need a forum to discuss and resolve these cutting-edge issues.

 

Important Dates:

 

● August  31, 2007: Deadline for submitting the abstract.

● November 30, 2007: Notification of acceptance.

 

Form and submission of abstracts:

 

An abstract(.pdf or .doc file) should be up to 3 pages long, including data and references.

The abstract should start with the title of the paper, followed by the text of the abstract.

Please do not include the author's name in the abstract. On a separate page, please give

the author's name, affiliation, e-mail address, telephone number, mailing address, the paper title and the session number(title).

 

Please send the abstract and the author's information to both [email protected] and [email protected].