15 Oct
2015
15 Oct
'15
3:56 p.m.
The CEU Department of Cognitive Science and the Social Mind Center
cordially invites you to its talk by
Ira Noveck (Laboratory for Language, Brain and Cognition, University of
Lyon)
Date: Wednesday, October 21, 2015 - 17:00-18:30
Host: Dan Sperber
Location: Department of Cognitive Science, CEU, Oktober 6 street 7,
room 101.
Towards an experimentally-based taxonomy of pragmatic inferences
“In this talk I will review some of the highlights from the
experimental pragmatics literature while arguing for a distinction
between two kinds of pragmatic enrichments, those that I call voluntary
and those that I call coerced. Voluntary pragmatic enrichments,
exemplified by scalar inferences, are optional in the sense that the
linguistically encoded meaning of an utterance could be good enough for
discerning a speaker's informative intention; in these cases,
enrichments arise in order to produce a narrower interpretation. That
is, while Some cats are mammals can be considered true if one employs
Some with its lexical meaning (which can be viewed as good enough for
processing), a listener who has the processing capability is in the
position to enrich the meaning of Some (so that it is taken to mean Some
and not all) and produce a false response. Coerced readings, exemplified
by metaphor, arise when a pragmatic enrichment is practically necessary
on the part of the listener in order to arrive at a reasonable
hypothesis about the speaker's meaning. Sentences such as My son is a
tadpole would be false without such effort. This distinction between
voluntary and coerced enrichments can be handy for describing
empirically difficult cases such as the invited inferences linked to
conditionals (e.g. how if p then q appears to generate if q then p) and
for describing why data appear to vary with respect to those who fall on
the autism spectrum.”
We are looking forward to see you at the talk!
Cognitive Science Events at CEU: http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events
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