1 November: DCLRS -- Jonathan Ginzburg, "What can and what cannot go wrong in
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar: Index of November 2008 | Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of year: 2008 | Full index
Seminar Announcement:
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar
DCLRS 2008/2009
DCU DIT TCD UCD
Venue: Jonathan Swift Lecture Theatre (Arts Building 2041a)
Trinity College Dublin
Time: 16:00, Friday, November 7, 2008
Title:
What can and what cannot go wrong in Interaction
Speaker:
Dr. Jonathan Ginzburg
King's College, London
Abstract:
There is in semantics a tradition that goes back to Frege,
subsequently developed in rigorous detail by logicians and applied
with huge success to a wide range of phenomena by linguists in work
emanating from Montague et seq. In a sentence, this is *semantics as
characterizing successful communication*. A conversation oriented
semantics cannot restrict itself in this way: as emphasized over the
years by Conversation Analysis, butressed by corpus studies we survey,
repair phenomena such as clarification requests are coherent and
ubiquitous. What this calls for is a theory of meaning which
integrates illocutionary and metacommunicative interaction. The basic
criterion for adequacy of such a theory is the ability to characterize
for any utterance type the update that emerges in the aftermath of
successful mutual understanding and the full range of possible
clarification requests otherwise. This is, one might say, the early
21st century analogue of truth conditions.
I will sketch a characterization of those aspects of interaction in
which we can anticipate the need for clarification interaction (aka
CRification), as well as those in which we expect this not to
happen. The former includes referential elements and intentional
parameters; the latter involves inter alia "quantified elements". And
yet things are not so simple: quantified elements can give rise to
CRification. What does this tell us about the kind of theory of
quantification we need? I will offer some pointers.
Autumn Schedule:
October 17 Mark Buckley (Edinburgh/Saarbruecken)
October 24 Marilyn Walker (Sheffield)
October 31 Tony Veale (UCD)
November 7 Jonathan Ginzburg (KCL)
November 14 John Kelleher and Brian Mac Namee (DIT)
November 21 Alexander Troussov (IBM, Dublin)
November 28 Rachele De Felice (Oxford)
December 5 Nick Campbell (ATR/TCD)
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of November 2008 | Index of year: 2008 | Full index