Call for papers

Linguists, logicians, philosophers, psychologists, and interested researchers from other areas are cordially invited to join the 17th Workshop on the Roots of Pragmasemantics to be held on the top of the Szrenica mountain in the Giant Mountains on the border of Poland and the Czech Republic on March 4-7, 2016.

The main theme of this year’s convention is “Conceptual Semantics meets Compositional Semantics”. This theme builds on recent efforts to build a dialogue between the disparate domains of Conceptual Semantics, concerned with meaning as a relation between language and the mind, often focusing on the level of lexical meaning, and Compositional Semantics, which understands meaning as a relation between language and the external reality in terms of reference and a model of composition. Contributions are encouraged from both fields as well as work trying to connect the two domains.

Confirmed invited speakers are:

·      Lotte Hogeweg (University of Amsterdam)

·      Louise McNally (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

·      Galit Sassoon (Bar-Ilan University)

·      Joost Zwarts (Utrecht University)

(Simon Dobnik, unfortunately, had to cancel.)

We invite submission of blind abstracts of no longer than 250 words in PDF, to be sent to szklarskaporebaworkshop17@gmail.com by November 30, 2015.

We especially invite submissions related to these topics but also welcome contributions relevant to any of the more classical subjects of this workshop series. Experimental as well as theoretical approaches are welcome. We in particular encourage the presentation of innovative ideas, even if still in need of later refinement.

More traditional Szklarska Poreba themes include:

·    Coordination on meaning

·    Inference in natural language

·    Experimental semantics and pragmatics

·    Bayesian models of interpretation

·    Quantum cognition and language

·    Grammaticalisation and other approaches to diachrony

·    Language typology and semantics/pragmatics

·    Game theoretical pragmatics

·    Formal models of language acquisition

·    Explicature and implicature

·    The architecture of the syntax/semantics interface

·    Licensing of polarity elements, quantification, etc.

·    The evolution of communication and language

·    Optimality theory