XPrag.de members Petra Schumacher and Hanna Weiland from project InfoPer: Processing speaker’s meaning: Informativeness and perspective are organizing the workshop "Perspective-taking" at the Annual meeting of the DGfS 2015.
The workshop is organized as part of the Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) to be held in Leipzig, Germany, March 4-6, 2015 (DGfS Meeting 2015)
Organizers:
Stefan Hinterwimmer, Petra B. Schumacher & Hanna Weiland; University of Cologne
Invited speakers:
Barbara Dancygier, University of British Columbia
Dale Barr, University of Glasgow
Pragmatic theories assign an important role to speakers and their intentions and beliefs. The perspective conveyed by a particular utterance impacts the interpretation of speaker meaning and it may even change the truth-values of an utterance (cf. e.g., Travis 1997). Theory of mind, which accounts for the ability to attribute mental states to oneself or others, and the notion of common ground think of perspective in a less restricted way. In language processing, the ability of shared mental states has been investigated with adults, children and in language disorders like Asperger Syndrome. These studies provide a first indication of the impact of perspective. Additionally, there are subtle variations in perspective in different pronominal forms. In this regard, typological research reveals intriguing effects of perspective.
The workshop will focus on the phenomenon of perspective-taking both from a processing and a theoretical view and address the following questions:
- Which aspects of perspective-taking are important for the interlocutors to succeed in daily communication?
- Which linguistic or general cognitive abilities are required to compute perspectival aspects during language processing?
- Are there default strategies that are adopted during processing (cf. e.g., Keysar et al. 2000 on the priority of egocentric perspective under certain conditions)?
- Is perspective-taking a marginal pragmatic phenomenon or a key aspect of human communication?
- How is perspective expressed linguistically (e.g., demonstratives or logophors may convey specific perspective cues)?
- Which distinctions are available (e.g., self-/hearer-/other-directed speech; self/source/pivot; speaker/location/thing as perspectival anchor)?
- How should perspective be represented (i.e. as unarticulated constituents of the sentence or as common ground)?
We are interested in contributions from researchers who work on perspective-taking from a theoretical or empirical stance. We welcome submissions from linguistics, cognitive sciences and philosophy.
References:
Keysar, B., Barr, D. J., Balin, J. A., & Brauner, J. S. 2000. Psychological Science, 11(1), 32-38.
Travis, C. 1997. Pragmatics. In B. Hale & C. Wright (Eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language (pp. 87 – 106). Oxford: Blackwell.
Abstract submission:
Abstracts are invited for 30-minute talks (20 minutes presentation plus discussion). Abstracts should be anonymous and confined to 1-2 pages in pdf. Please note that accepted talks will have to provide short abstracts of 400 words length at a later point in time.
Please send a pdf-file to hanna.weiland@uni-koeln.de. The subject of the message should specify ‚Perspective Abstract’, and the body of the message should include author name(s), affiliation(s) and contact information (including email address), and the title of the abstract.
The languages of the conference are English and German, and abstracts should be written in the language of presentation. However, we encourage submission of papers in English.
Important dates:
August 20, 2014: Deadline for abstract submission
September 15, 2014: Notification of acceptance
March 4-6, 2015: DGfS Workshop in Leipzig