Viewing Experimental Pragmatics from a Cognitive Science perspective

Lecturers: Ira Noveck, CNRS Institut des Sciences Cognitives – Marc Jeannerod in Lyon / Diana Mazzarella, University of Neuchâtel
Room: 1.401
For many scholars, pragmatics is a component of the linguistic system that allows us to deal with the interpretation of a given sentence through some well-defined rules or constraints. For others, pragmatics is an exercise in mind-reading, by which the hearer infers the speaker’s intended meaning. It is this latter view, especially, that takes one beyond linguistics and into the cognitive sciences more generally. This view also justifies presenting experimental pragmatics as a cognitive science that adopts approaches from its more fundamental forebears.
The course will discuss the relationship between pragmatics and other cognitive sciences by presenting their historical connections as well as their intersection in the study of human cognition and communication. The course will discuss the way in which pragmatic inference interacts with reasoning and social cognition (Theory of Mind, epistemic vigilance, group cognition) by focusing on a series of different pragmatic phenomena, such as scalar inferences, conditionals and figurative uses of language.
Course material

Mon Aug 5th

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    From Philosophical Disputes to Experiments: The main cleavage in Experimental Pragmatics

Tue Aug 6th

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    Pragmatics and reasoning I: Are scalar inferences conversational implicatures?

Wed Aug 7th

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    Pragmatics and reasoning II: Are conditionals conventional implicatures?

Thu Aug 8th

Fri Aug 9th

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    Pragmatics and Theory of Mind

Mon Aug 12th

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    Pragmatics and communicative development

Tue Aug 13th

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    Pragmatics and epistemic vigilance

Wed Aug 14th

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    Pragmatics and face-management

Thu Aug 15th

Fri Aug 16th

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    Pragmatics and social psychology