READING GROUPS: SPLAP

The reading and discussion group SPLAP (Semantics, Pragmatics and LAnguage Philosophy) has been handed the baton for the second leg of a three-quarter relay. The relay began in Spring 2015 in Adrian Brasoveanu‘s semantics seminar, which dealt with the incremental interpretation of formal semantics, unifying work in dynamic logic, psycholinguistics, and cognitive modeling. The theme has been passed on to SPLAP for the second leg of the relay; this quarter we’re reading and discussing work on the intersection between semantics & pragmatics and cognition. Our readings so far have dealt with the way that discourse coherence and syntactic structure interact probabilistically to resolve pronoun reference, and with how domain-general Bayesian reasoning can be applied to the interpretation of semantic ambiguities and the generation of pragmatic inferences. The relay will end in spectacular fashion next quarter, with a one-day workshop on February 6. The workshop will feature two external speakers (Andrew Kehler from UCSD and Noah Goodman from Stanford) and two internal speakers (TBA, stay tuned).