It’s that time of year again, when we take ourselves off to Poland to ski and discuss pragmasemantics. Apparently I’m programme chair again (don’t know me, confused about the name?), I suspect this is due to Reinhard reusing the email from last year’s workshop. “Relevance” is the new theme, but this shouldn’t put you off submitting something… erm… irrelevant. Anyone who has heard me enthuse about my PhD research, for instance, will see my topics down there in the section on Cultural Evolution.

For those who haven’t been before, the workshop takes place in a ski hostel right on the Polish/Czech border. We have a morning session then a break from about 10:30 until about 5, then the bulk of the talks in the evening. The break conveniently parallels the hours that the ski lifts operate.

The official announcement and more contact details are after the fold. (NB: I removed email addresses –to dissuade harvester bots– and replaced them with links to the relevant homepages. Some of these might be out of date, if you’re having trouble contacting anyone get in touch with me.)

Conference Homepage (note that this seems to have the details from last year at the moment.)

First announcement

7th Szklarska Poreba Workshop on the Roots of Pragmasemantics

March 3-7, 2006

This is to announce the seventh instalment of a workshop that takes linguists and experimental philosophers to the ski slopes. It will be held March 3 until March 7, and will take place at the same location as last year, the mountaintop of the Szrenica (Poland). Information about past meetings (with photos and video clips) can be found on Reinhard Blutner’s home page.

Workshop themes

The Workshop aims to bring together linguists, philosophers, logicians and all others interested in the semantics and pragmatics of natural language. This year, a main topic of the workshop will be relevance. However, as usual in the last years the idea of a ‘hot topic’ should not exclude other themes ranging from descriptive analyses of the syntax and semantics of natural language to theoretical properties of pragmasemantic theories, philosophical foundations, approaches to cultural evolution and learning.

Relevance

  • Definitions of relevance
  • Neo-Gricean and Post-Gricean theories of using relevance
  • Explicatures and implicatures
  • Fossilization theory
  • Lexical pragmatics
  • Experimental pragmatics (the online processing of implicatures)

Syntax and Semantics

  • Architecture of the syntax/semantics interface
  • diachronic aspects of syntacs
  • grammaticalization studies
  • information structure and prosody
  • the nature of displacement and its syntax/semantic effects (e.g., locality)
  • licensing of polarity elements, quantification, etc.
  • developing syntax and semantics from the perspective of bidirectional OT pragmatics/Game theory.

Cultural evolution

  • the evolution of communication and language
  • historical linguistics
  • language typology
  • What are the origins of human language, and how did its evolution impact on its structure?
  • Recruitment theories versus theories of iterated learning
  • Evolutionary foundations of general pragmatic principles.

Submission of Abstracts

The program will host about 15 talks of 30 minutes and 5 talks of 45 minutes (including discussions). Authors can submit an abstract of about 500 words.

The official deadline for the submission of abstracts is FRIDAY JANUARY 20 and they should preferably go to Samson de Jager. Authors will be notified of acceptance by JANUARY 31.

Very welcome would also be proposals for non-scientific events (preferably to Kata Balogh).

You can check the current weather conditions at our destination (we are the top station, stacja górna 1310 m n.p.m.).

All the best and hope to see you on the mountain top

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact one of us.