School of European Culture and Languages

Exploitation of Context in Communication

Leverhulme Trust International Network Grant

Professor Laurence Goldstein (Philosophy)

In conversational situations, speakers typically are able to produce concise utterances by exploiting salient features of the environment including, importantly, the beliefs and knowledge that they take their conversational partners to possess. This form of ellipsis needs to be studied both as a linguistic phenomenon and as a challenge for cognitive scientific explanation, and the network brings together specialists in these areas and in philosophy. The investigation will throw light on topics as diverse as language processing, situation comedy, and the problem of the non-substitutivity of co-referential expressions.

School of European Culture & Languages, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NF

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Last Updated: 30/09/2011