The Formal and Experimental Pragmatics Workshop will take place August 11 - 15 2014 as part of ESSLLI 2014.

Formal pragmatics has recently experienced a new period of maturation, facilitated by two important factors: a) the novel application of mathematical modeling techniques, and b) access to rich experimental data. The recently emerging field of Experimental Pragmatics has painted a complex picture of the interaction between semantic and pragmatic information in phenomena as diverse as implicature, referentiality, figurative meaning, prosody, and presupposition. In parallel, advances in probabilistic and game-theoretic models that treat pragmatic inference as a problem of reasoning under uncertainty have yielded testable quantitative predictions about the outcome of many different kinds of pragmatic inference. Despite this progress, a great deal of work is needed on the mathematical foundations and quantitative empirical grounding of pragmatics, and, most critically, the connection between the two.  The aim of this workshop is to promote dialog and community for these lines of research: strengthening the search for an empirically grounded formal pragmatics.  

Given this goal, the workshop aims to provide a forum for advanced PhD students and researchers to present and discuss their work with colleagues and researchers who work in the broad subject areas represented at ESSLLI.


Invited speakers

Judith Degen (Stanford)
Bart Geurts (Nijmegen)
Roger Levy (UCSD)


Workshop format

The workshop is part of ESSLLI and is open to all ESSLLI participants. It will consist of five 90-minute sessions held over five consecutive days in the first week of ESSLLI. There will be 3 invited speakers, 7 slots for contributed papers (each of 20 minutes plus discussion time), or 6 slots for oral presentations and a poster session depending on the number of high quality submissions. On the first day the workshop organizers will give an introduction, situating the workshop contributions in the current debate. The last day concludes with a summary by the organizers and a reflection on the workshop's topics and the future direction of the field.