SPLAP! WORKSHOP REPORT
The SPLAP! (Semantics, Pragmatics and LAnguage Philosophy) reading group sponsored an all-day workshop this past Saturday (February 6). Graduate students Karen Duek, Margaret Kroll, and Deniz Rudin, who organized the workshop, had this gripping recap:
Speakers were Noah Goodman, who drove down from Stanford to present his work on “Uncertainty about language,” in which a number of dramatic results were shown to follow from a deceptively simple Bayesian model of how speakers and listeners reason about each other’s information and utterances; our very own MA student Chelsea Miller, who presented on “Diagnosing representations at ellipsis sites” (joint work with Matt Wagers), in which sophisticated psycholinguistic techniques applied to a clever design exploiting agreement attraction shed light on what exactly is going on inside ellipsis sites; UCSC semanticist extraordinaire Adrian Brasoveanu, who talked about the “Semantics of corrections” (joint work with Deniz Rudin, Karl DeVries, Karen Duek, and Kelsey Kraus), in which a careful empirical investigation of the grammar of self-correction is paired with a formal analysis that brings the full brunt of semantic theory to bear on the problem; and Andy Kehler, who flew up from UC San Diego (on Super Bowl weekend, no less!) so that he could present his work on “Conversational eliciture” (joint work with Jonathan Cohen and Hannah Rohde), in a talk that combines an elegant and convincing empirical delineation of the space of pragmatic inferences with an elegant and convincing Bayesian model of the differences between speaker and listener preferences for the resolution of pronoun reference. All talks were, in the opinion of these recappers, of the highest imaginable quality, and discussion periods were substantive, collegial, warm, and useful for all involved. A startlingly high number of people from our community elected to sit in a room from 9 to 5 on a sunny pleasant Saturday just to hear about linguistics, for which the organizers expressed gratefulness. The UCSC faculty in attendance reportedly found the workshop to be a smashing success, with particular emphasis on the timeliness and quality of the catering.
The SPLAP! workshop was made possible by a Tanya Honig Graduate Research Initiative Grant awarded to Karen Duek, Margaret Kroll, and Deniz Rudin, in collaboration with Karl DeVries, Hitomi Hirayama, Kelsey Kraus and Ben Mericli.