Abbreviations

For more information about the lecture halls and seminar rooms, see our lecture room page. The names listed under "Technical Assistance" are student volunteers who will act as a contact person for technical questions of the lecturers and workshop speakers during the course or workshop.

Experimental Investigations of the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface

There is a small but growing body of experimental research into questions posed in theoretical semantics and pragmatics. The research draws on techniques in psycholinguistics, language acquisition and neuro-science to provide means of testing empirical predictions of semantic and pragmatic theory. In addition it contributes to the development of models of the cognitive architecture surrounding language interpretation. This course will provide an introduction to the techniques used in Experimental Semantics/Pragmatics drawn from the relevant background experimental literature. It will then provide an overview of the current state of the field, taking in experimental research into a selection of topics from scalar implicature, presupposition, quantifier domain restriction and scope relations. In addition, broader theoretical themes will be highlighted and discussed - such as the status of notions like defaultness, context-sensitivity and the status of 'context-free' judgements, the role of interlocutors' mental states (including common ground) in on-line semantic-pragmatic processing.