Hannah Rohde is a Professor in Linguistics & English Language at the University of Edinburgh.  She works in experimental pragmatics, using psycholinguistic techniques to investigate questions about how speakers formulate their messages and how listeners draw inferences from what they hear.  Her work focuses on aspects of communication such as ambiguity, redundancy, deception, and the establishment of discourse coherence.  Her background includes an undergraduate degree in Computer Science & Linguistics from Brown University, followed by a PhD in Linguistics at the University of California San Diego, with postdoctoral fellowships at Northwestern and Stanford. Broadly, her work emphasizes the value of studying human language through the lens of computational models of information transfer and game-theoretic models of cooperative interaction.  More specifically, she studies phenomena like referring expression generation and implicature, domains encompassing the often unspoken meanings that underlie coherent conversation.  The premise of her work in these areas is that interlocutors not only establish these links retroactively but that they also use cues to anticipate where a discourse is going and what questions upcoming sentences are likely to answer.  She is a recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Languages and Literatures.

Keynote: Inferences of additional coherence-driven meaning within and across clauses

Discourse coherence relations are typically characterized as holding between clauses, whereby the propositional content of one clause stands in a relation with that of another clause.  Such relations can be marked explicitly with discourse connectives or they can be left implicit, to be recovered by a comprehender.  In this talk I present psycholinguistic data on additional coherence-driven inferences that are often overlooked.  One domain is at the level of full clauses, where the presence of an explicit connective may still leave open the possibility of the inference of an additional implicit coherence relation between adjacent clauses.  The second domain is clause-internal, where a variety of descriptors can trigger inferences about the relevance of that descriptive content for understanding the broader meaning of the text.  In both cases, questions arise as to the pervasiveness of such additional meaning and the factors that help signal the availability of these inferences.

Manfred Stede is a professor of applied computational linguistics at Potsdam University in Germany. His research and teaching activities revolve around issues in discourse structure and automatic discourse parsing, inlcuding applications in sentiment analysis and argument mining. For several years now, he actively collaborates with social scientists from different disciplines  on research questions involving political argumentation and social media analysis. Stede is a (co-) author of four books, 30 journal papers, and 150 conference or workshop papers and book chapters.

https://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~stede/

http://angcl.ling.uni-potsdam.de

Keynote: Connectives and Arguments

The English lexicon of connectives by Das et al. (2018) lists 31 connectives for the PDTB relation Contingency:Cause - words like because, therefore, thus, and so forth. The corresponding German lexicon (Scheffler/Stede 2016) even provides 79 words in that category. In this talk, we will briefly look at some reasons for this remarkable difference between the two languages, but our main question is: Why so many in the first place? Why is because not enough? We focus on texts of type argumentative, where causal connectives are used to mark the link between a premise and a claim: Because the economy is doing so well, we are in a good position to manage the transformation to renewable energies. Using corpora of argumentative text from different genres, linguistic experiments of different kinds, and LLMs, we sketch a map of fine-grained differences between similar connectives, which can be used to further enrich connective lexicons like the ones mentioned above and others in the online resource www.connective-lex.info.