32.2686, Calls: Pragmatics, Psycholinguistics/Germany

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-2686. Thu Aug 19 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.2686, Calls: Pragmatics, Psycholinguistics/Germany

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Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2021 03:39:03
From: Robin Lemke [robin.lemke at uni-saarland.de]
Subject: Discourse obligates – How and why discourse limits the way we express what we express (DGfS 2022, AG10)

 
Full Title: Discourse obligates – How and why discourse limits the way we express what we express (DGfS 2022, AG10) 

Date: 23-Feb-2022 - 25-Feb-2022
Location: Tübingen, Germany 
Contact Person: Robin Lemke
Meeting Email: robin.lemke at uni-saarland.de
Web Site: https://nds.uni-saarland.de/discourse_obligates/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics 

Call Deadline: 22-Aug-2021 

Meeting Description:

It is common knowledge that discourse determines to a large extent the way we
express what we want to express. In theoretical linguistics, this insight has
been described primarily in terms of information structural notions like
topic, focus and common ground (CG). For instance, while new, or focused,
information typically pushes to the right, given, or backgrounded, information
tends to be realized to the left. Similarly, information structure has been
argued to license ellipsis and the choice between referring expressions, i.e.
a pronoun and a more complex noun phrase.

More recently, information-theoretic approaches have also been taken to
account for the choice between alternative encodings of a message, which they
model based on Shannon information (surprisal) and the idea that information
is distributed as uniformly as possible across a linguistic utterance (Levy &
Jaeger 2007). From this perspective, the background-focus split is derived
from a tendency for less informative expressions to precede more informative
ones, since they contribute to their predictability (Fenk-Oczlon 1989). This
information-theoretical approach is becoming increasingly popular and has been
successfully applied to phenomena as diverse as word order, complementizer
deletion, the realization of discourse connectives, VP ellipsis, topic drop,
and fragments (see e.g. Lemke et al. 2020).

One needs to be aware of the fact though that two fundamentally different
notions of information are at stake here: semantic information in the case of
information-structural approaches, and occurrence probabilities in the case of
information-theoretical approaches.

We would like to start a lively discussion on the question whether the two
different perspectives relate to each other in an interesting way. This
includes, but is not limited to, syntactic variation (e.g. word order and
ellipsis), prosodic variation and the choice of referential expressions.

We particularly welcome contributions that focus on the relationship between
approaches from information structure and information theory. Which phenomena
are better explained by an information-structural or information-theoretic
account, and which might require to take into account both of these
perspectives?


2nd Call for Papers:

We invite submissions for talks (20 minutes + 10 discussion). Abstracts must
be no longer than one page. An additional page for examples, figures, data and
references is allowed. Abstracts must be submitted in 12-point font, US Letter
size or A4 paper with 1 inch/2.5 cm margins and in PDF format. The files must
be fully anonymized and they must be submitted through the form on the
workshop website
(https://nds.uni-saarland.de/discourse_obligates/index.php/abstract-submission
/). Upon acceptance, participants will be requested to submit a de-anonymized
shortened version of the abstract for the conference booklet.




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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-2686	
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