Im Rahmen des Forschungsseminars laden wir recht herzlich ein zum Vortrag:

Dr. Henk Zeevat (Univ. Düsseldorf)
"Causal and Identity inferences in Natural Language Interpretation"

Abstract
Causal and identity inferences are natural inferences in perception and in interpreting natural language of a causal relation between two events or of an identity between two independently given objects or events. Two examples in natural language are:
John pressed the button. The bomb exploded. (inferred:the pressing caused the explosion)
Aliena broke her skis. She lost her only means of transport. (inferred: Aliena is she, the breaking is the losing, the skis are the means of transport)
The talk will try to explain why they are important for the explanation of presupposition projection in natural language pragmatics, will sketch an account of how such inferences come about, and will especially discuss the question of how the causal knowledge required for the inferences can be acquired by subjects.
For this last purpose, a Causal Update Semantics will be developed that can learn various kinds of causal knowledge and in which the inferences can be modeled.

Speaker
Henk Zeevat is a Mercator Fellow in SFB991 in Duesseldorf since last November. He studied philosophy in Amsterdam, had various research positions in Edinburgh and Stuttgart before becoming a associate professor in computational linguistics at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation in Amsterdam in 1990. Most of his work is concerned with dynamic semantics, as applied to discourse phenomena like anaphora, discourse particles, presupposition and propositional attitudes. More recently, he worked on an attempt to develop a Bayesian picture of semantic and pragmatic interpretation. This resulted in a book: Production and Interpretation of Natural Language (Brill 2014).