Overview

Recent work in implicature has seen a great deal of activity within two lines of research: the rational choice approach associated with game-theoretic pragmatics and the Bayesian Rational Speech Act framework, and the exhaustification-based approach. While these frameworks have generally been thought to be in theoretical tension, there are also underexplored ways to combine them, with the potential to benefit both approaches. The workshop will explore explicit comparisons between the two frameworks as well as efforts to combine them, with the hope of producing a more unified theory of implicature and a more general understanding of the data that such a theory must account for.

Schedule

August 9-13 (Monday-Friday), meeting at

• 17:30-19:00 CET on Monday August 9-Thursday August 12, and

• 16:00-17:30 CET on Friday August 13.

Talk abstracts are linked here.

Monday August 9:

• 17:30-18:15: Introduction by the workshop organizers [Degen slides]

• 18:15-19:00: Milica Denić (ILLC): "Probabilistic informativeness of alternatives in implicature computation" [slides]

Tuesday August 10:

• 17:30-18:15: Christopher Potts (Stanford): "Rational choices about complex linguistic representations" [slides]

• 18:15-19:00: Danny Fox (MIT) and Roni Katzir (Tel Aviv): "Rational choice and/or exhaustification: an assessment" [slides]

Wednesday August 11:

• 17:30-18:15: Marie-Christine Meyer (ZAS): "Is implicature reducible to rational and/or cooperative behavior?"

• 18:15-19:00: Alexandre Cremers (Institut Jean-Nicod & Vilnius University, joint work with Benjamin Spector and Ethan Wilcox): "Testing probabilistic models of exhaustivity" [slides]

Thursday August 12:

• 17:30-18:15: Nicole Gotzner (Potsdam): "The measurement mechanism: The role of scale structure and granularity in implicature computation"

• 18:15-19:00: Erica Yoon (Stanford) and Michael Henry Tessler (MIT): "Beyond information: Rational use of polite language to communicate social goals"

Friday August 13 (note exceptional time slot – 16:00-17:30 CET):

• 16:00-16:45: Richard Breheny (UCL): "A limited role for exhaustification in explaining scalar implicature – evidence from scalar diversity"

• 16:45-17:30: General discussion

How to attend

To attend, you must register for ESSLLI 2021 at this link for a modest fee .

This registration also gives you access to a wide variety of other wonderful courses and workshops running from July 26 until August 13: see the schedule here.

Organizers

• Judith Degen (Stanford)

• Benjamin Spector (Institut Jean Nicod)

• Daniel Lassiter (Stanford)

Contact

Email danlassiter@stanford.edu with any questions.