一、主讲人：向明
二、时间：2022年03月30日（周三）下午15:00-17:00
三、地点：广东外语外贸大学北校区一教北楼446
腾讯会议：489-642-459
四、主办单位：人事处、教师发展中心
承办单位：英语语言文化学院
五、讲座内容简介：
There is a growing body of psycholinguistics work arguing that comprehenders are capable of integrating interlocutor-based pragmatic reasoning into sentence comprehension. Under the traditional Gricean approach and the more recently formalized bayesian version of it, a listener's interpretation of a sentence is the outcome of a rational reasoning process that takes into account a speaker's intentions and production choices in a particular communicative context. Acknowledging the success of this approach, in this talk, I want to take a closer look at how much comprehension should be explained by a speaker-dependent pragmatic reasoning process, and how much should be handled by a listener's independently acquired knowledge of semantic conventions. The case studies I will discuss involve the interpretation of gradable adjectives. Gradable adjectives conveniently lend themselves to the current investigation, because their interpretation is highly context dependent. Gradable adjectives denote properties that are relativized to contextual thresholds of application, e.g. how long an object must be in order to count as long in a context of utterance depends on what the threshold is in that context. But thresholds are variable across contexts and adjectives, and are in general uncertain. In the first part of this talk, using both human judgment data and computational modeling results, I will explore whether Bayesian pragmatics can completely replace the need to postulate lexical semantic conventions for contextually-sensitive thresholds. Our results showed that the best model performance is achieved when Bayesian pragmatic reasoning is supplemented with the traditionally assumed semantic conventions for thresholds. In the second part of this talk, using the eye-tracking data from a visual-world paradigm, I will demonstrate that the well-known referential contrast effect in the literature (Sedivy et al., 1999), which standardly receives a Gricean pragmatic explanation, may actually be better explained with a semantic-threshold-based explanation. Both case studies raise questions about whether the field has overextended the role of pragmatic reasoning in sentence comprehension.
六、主讲人简介：
向明教授，目前任教于芝加哥大学语言学系，并主持芝加哥大学语言加工实验室。长期从事心理语言学和理论语言学研究。主要研究兴趣为自然语言的句子加工，研究对象涉及句法、语义和语篇理解等多个领域的现象。同时，向明教授对汉语比较句和副词“都”的句法和语义也有深入研究。研究成果均刊于 Journal of Memory and Language, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Journal of Neurolinguistics, Brain and Language, Glossa, Journal of East Asian Linguistics, NeuroImage 等国际著名语言学期刊。
七、报名方式：
请登录教师发展中心官方网站活动报名地址http://ctdapply.gdufs.edu.cn/进行网上在线报名。（首次登录，需要进行账户注册，可凭此账号查看报名相关情况，并参加教师发展中心其它活动。）请有兴趣参加本次讲座的老师于3月30日12:00以前报名，如有疑问，请致电教师发展中心，联系电话：36641382（短号：2382）。
人事处、教师发展中心
英语语言文化学院
2022年3月28日
当前位置: