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SUMMARY:The role of dynamic pragmatics in negation processing -  Richard B
 reheny (UCL)
DTSTART:20130425T160000Z
DTEND:20130425T173000Z
UID:TALK41205@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Alison Biggs
DESCRIPTION:In this talk I will present work being done by Ye Tian and mys
 elf that attempts to bring together ideas from theoretical semantics/pragm
 atics and mainstream sentence processing research. Theory says that we sho
 uld consider interpretation in terms of an update to a kind of shared info
 rmation state. Psycholinguistics says that language processing is probabil
 istic and incremental. Incrementalism means that automatic processes take 
 linguistic input together with information in utterance situation to yield
  (anticipatory) hypotheses about interpretation. Thus\, on-line interpreta
 tion processes make hypotheses about how shared information is being updat
 ed. We argue that such a view is necessary given recent results concerning
  particularised implicatures. In this talk\, I will show how this perspect
 ive on language processing sheds new light on well-known results concernin
 g how negation is processed. We show that classic results in verification 
 tasks due to Clark & Chase (1972) and many others results result from the 
 way context update is affected by negation. Our results undermine classic 
 proposition-comparison models proposed to explain verification results. We
  also show that ‘rejection’ models of negation favoured among embodime
 nt theorists (e.g. Kaup et al 2007) do not make correct predictions in all
  cases. We propose instead that we can account for how negative sentences 
 are processed by adopting a situation-theoretic approach to negation (e.g.
  in Cooper 1998) combined with the dynamic-incremental view.
LOCATION:GR04\, English Faculty\, 9 West Road (Sidgwick Site)
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