The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Monday, February 3 at 3 pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/16ZiB1ATRMGSUxbkGOJGvw.
Nicolas Poisson (McGill University) will be presenting a talk, “The role of metarepresentation in pragmatics, an example from scalar implicatures.” Here is Nicolas’s abstract:
In this talk I ask the question of how higher order beliefs of speakers about listeners modulate pragmatic reasoning. Using experiments on scalar implicatures, I replicate a task where participants are shown a situation of false belief and have to judge the possibility of using or not a scalar item accordingly. In our case, listeners believe that the speaker is competent, while she’s in fact not. This manipulation allows to see to which extent speakers take listener’s belief into account while choosing their utterance, given that if they know that competence is assumed by the listener, it could be misleading to say ‘some’ because the listener will automatically derive the scalar implicature ‘some but not all’, a state of the world which is not guaranteed for the speaker in our setup.