Formal Pragmatics

LECTURER: Benjamin Spector
August 19-23, 09.00-10.30, Room 3.104

This is an introduction to the formal pragmatics of natural languages. Instead of covering the domain exhaustively, which is not really possible, I will focus on two major pragmatic phenomena which have been extensively studied in formal semantics/pragmatics: scalar implicatures and presuppositions. 

Roadmap:

1. What is pragmatics? The Gricean programs; Formalizing Moore’s paradox; first steps in formalizing scalar implicatures

2. Modern formal pragmatic theories of scalar implicatures and exhaustivity phenomena

3. Embedded implicatures and the grammatical approach to scalar implicatures and exhaustivity

4. Presuppositions: introduction to the phenomenon, sketch of the trivalent approaches

5. More on the trivalent approach to presuppositions; time permitting, interactions between implicatures and presuppositions.