I find it kind of difficult to keep two blogs, one at work, one personal...So I have not written much here. Which is just as well, as I have been behind with lots and lots of things to do and very few done. So this is not a proper post, but a 'hang-in-there' post, wait for me, I will be back. Soon. I hope.
Tania Rojas-Esponda gave a talk last week at Nuance on questions under discussion and particles. The abstract is below, together with Tania's short bio, requested by me. This post is simply a page to hang her slides and paper from, before she puts them in her own website.
QUDs and S-trees: Formal tools for reading between the lines in dialogue
Abstract:
A
central premise in pragmatics is that additional information can be
obtained from utterances by factoring in contextual cues, such as the
goals of interlocutors. I will talk about the notion of a Question under
Discussion (QUD for short), a question that is seen as guiding the
moves of participants in discourse. By leveraging work from the
semantics of questions, we can give formal characterizations of the
structure of conversation and of speaker cooperation. I will illustrate a
variety of ways in which QUDs are useful. These include ambiguity
resolution, inference, and new avenues for understanding
non-truth-conditional expressions, such as discourse particles.
Bio:
Tania
Rojas-Esponda's path started in mathematics (BA Princeton, Part III
Univ. of Cambridge, MS Stanford). She later found a way to combine her
formal skills with her long-standing passion for languages via the study
of linguistics. Currently, Tania is a PhD candidate in the Stanford
linguistics department. She has done research in semantics/pragmatics
and in phonology. For her thesis, she is investigating formal approaches
to understanding discourse particles.
(Cleo Condoravdi, Tania's co-advisor, joined us too)
No comments:
Post a Comment