Mora Maldonado, Alexander Martin and Jennifer Culbertson

Week 1, August 3-7, 2020

Abstract:

What is the range of variation in human languages? Despite their apparent differences, natural languages seem to exhibit many profound similarities between them. These similarities, often referred to as _linguistic universals_ (though they are often strong statistical tendencies rather than totally universal) occur at all levels of linguistic analysis, ranging from phonology to semantics. In order to identify which properties are constant across languages and which ones are not, researchers have traditionally relied mainly on data from acquisition or typology.

Judith Degen, Benjamin Spector and Daniel Lassiter

Week 2, August 10-14, 2020

Abstract:

We propose to organize a workshop which will bring together researchers interested in two prominent threads of work on implicature in natural language. The first is the rational choice approach associated with game-theoretic pragmatics and its close relative, the Bayesian Rational Speech Acts model. The second is the exhaustification-based approach. While these approaches have generally been thought to be in theoretical tension, there are also underexplored ways to combine them, with the potential to benefit both approaches. We will encourage researchers to compare the theoretical resources and empirical predictions of the two approaches separately and also when combined, 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.