Welcome Notes
Welcome from the spokepersons of the Priority Program XPrag.de
Dear Participants of the DGfS/XPrag.de Summer School,
we are very delighted to welcome you to the DGfS/XPrag.de Summer School „Experimental Pragmatics: Theory, Methods, Interfaces“.
We started to prepare this summer school seven years ago in 2012, when we wrote the funding application for the priority program XPrag.de. It is so exciting to see our plans come to fruition and welcome almost 200 participants including the 25 lecturers in Berlin for this summer school.
A priority program such as XPrag.de is a national research priority funded by the German research council DFG. The 32 projects in XPrag.de will receive in total over 10 million Euro of research funding from the start of the program in 2014 to its official end in mid 2020, though individual projects may go on for longer than that.
The summer school is the last big event organized by XPrag.de. Most of the lecturers at this summer school were involved in some way in the XPrag.de program — as PIs of a project, as Mercator fellows, as postdoctoral researchers within a project or as PIs of an associated project. We hope that some of the intellectual energy and results of XPrag.de will find a receptive audience at this summer school.
We have many people to thank that contributed to the success of XPrag.de or the preparation of this summer school but will leave this for another occasion. One person however clearly invested a lot of time both in the program and the summer school, namely Fabienne Salfner. Without Fabienne’s management, we would have been overwhelmed by the many demands of coordinating a priority program and this school.
We are grateful for the DFG for providing financial support for this summer school as part of the priority program XPrag.de. We thank our host institution, the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics, for providing additional financial support from its core budget. We also thank the Humboldt University at Berlin, for offering us a substantial discount on the lecture room rental. Finally, we thank the DGfS for its collaboration and its organizational and financial support, especially for the travel support grants for selected students.
We wish all participants a successful, interesting, and enjoyable summer school!
Uli Sauerland und Petra Schumacher
Welcome from the German Linguistic Society (DGfS)
Dear participants and lecturers of the DGfS Summer School 2019,
We are very happy to welcome you to this year’s DGfS Summer School “Experimental Pragmatics: Theory, Methods, Interfaces” in Berlin.
The Summer School is hosted by the Priority Programme XPrag.de and we could not be more delighted to see the exciting programme offered by 25 lecturers from all over the world. The area of experimental pragmatics is a vibrant field, where new methods are used to cast a light on long-standing issues in pragmatic theory and beyond. Covering issues such as speech acts, reference, language evolution, eye-tracking and many more, the Summer School mirrors the breadth of the field – and the depth to which these topics have been developed is also very clearly reflected in the class descriptions. We are rapidly developing a better understanding of language and communication as a capacity of the human mind.
Needless to say, an event as big as this one, would not be possible without the unwavering commitment of those who make it happen. A heartfelt thank you on behalf of the DGfS therefore goes out to the organizing committee from XPrag.de: Uli Sauerland, Petra Schumacher and Fabienne Salfner.
Another thank you of course, goes out to all of you for joining us! We wish you a thought-provoking, stimulating and joyful time at the Summer School!
Pia Bergmann (on behalf of the DGfS)