Language and Logic advanced course:
How to do things with words: Speech Acts in Linguistics, Philosophy and Computation.

• Regine Eckardt ()
• Magdalena Schwager ()

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Speech acts have been discovered in philosophy as acts that can be done with words or moves in a language game. They still pose a challenge to semantic theory where, typically, declarative sentences are analysed as denoting propositions. The two views of sentences as containers of information, and as moves in social interaction, can not easily be reconciled.

Grammar and speech act level are not completely disconnected. Practically all languages distinguish between three sentence modes, declarative, interrogative, imperative, which are prototypically tied to the respective speech acts. But many more aspects of grammar refer to language's function in social interaction: The use of subjunctive can serve to distinguish reported speech acts from executed speech acts. Particles, discourse adverbs and NPIs can serve as speech act markers. Examples abound, consider German wohl which turns questions into self-directed questions: Wer bringt Kaffee mit? "who will bring coffee?" (real question) Wer bringt wohl Kaffee mit? "who will wohl bring coffee?" (speaker asks herself) Doch/denn distinguish verb-initial exclamatives from yes/no questions: Hat er denn einen Hund mitgebracht? "has he brought along a dog?" Hat er doch einen Hund mitgebracht! "And what he did was bring a DOG along!" Intensifiers like English so can be used to emphasize properties ("He is so tall.") but arguably (Potts) also (preconditions of) speech acts ("He is so next in line.").

Historical ties Research on grammaticalization proves that indirect directive speech acts grammaticalize into grammarical markers of imperative sentence mood. Strikingly, languages exhibit exactly those grammaticalization paths that would be predicted by Searle's theory of indirect speech acts. While this parallel is satisfactory from a theoretical perspective, its consequences are largely unexplored. Are similar grammaticalization patterns known for other indirect speech acts? Other sentence modes? Why is it that grammars limit themselves to three sentence modes while major speech act classifications rest on at least five-six major groups, which subdivide into many more specific kinds of acts?

Analysis of speech acts Formal theories of speech acts exist (e.g. SDRT, Asher/Lascarides, but also philosophical approaches ranging from Stalnaker/Lewis to Searle/Vanderveken), but are usually phrased as orthogonal to, and disconnected from truth conditional semantics of the clause. However, there are many words that have a meaning both in semantics and at speech act level; consider quantification into speech acts, cookie conditionals ("if you're hungry, there are cookies on the table") and more. Can such cross-domain phenomena be captured in a way that makes the ties between the two levels maximally transparent? Related to this is the question whether there is any way to delimit the number of speech acts, and to come up with clear criteria to identify and distinguish them.

Speech acts and automatic language processing

Finally, applications in language processing are often based on a scenario of speaker-machine interaction which involves more than a simple exchange of propositional content. Such applications often rest on simple, task-driven models of "doing things with words". Is there anything that formal semanticists can learn from such theories that have been tested against real communication? Can semanticists contribute something to this type of models?

Language and Logic advanced course:
Plurality and distributivity across language(s) and logic(s).

• Eytan Zweig ()
• George Tsoulas ()

Keywords: plurality, distributivity

This course offers an in-depth survey of the state of the art in the research on plurality and distributivity. While logic treats distributivity as a straightforward logical property of quantifiers and predicates, natural languages present a picture both more subtle and complex. Different languages exhibit an array of strategies for the expression of distributivity and many different constraints on what can acquire a distributive interpretation in which contexts. We present a picture of the crosslinguistic variation in the expression of distributivity drawing data from languages including English, French, German, Greek, Korean, and Japanese. Attempting synthesis of insights from plural logics and from the linguistic semantics of distributivity, we will examine what is necessary for a plural logic system that will capture the nuances expressed across natural languages. The course is addressed to students with a solid grasp of basic semantics including generalised quantifier theory and basic notions of boolean algebra.

Language and Logic advanced course:
Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives on Discourse.

• Nicholas Asher ()

This course will present an overview of current research on discourse both from a theoretical and empirical point of view. I will begin with the theoretical point of view, concentrating on Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), which has made most explicit the ties between discourse semantics and more traditional linguistic fields of pragmatics and semantics. I will also compare RST, DLTag and other theories to SDRT. I then will detail the empirical stumbling block for all of these theories, which is the scaling up to real world, domain independent texts. I will review empirical approaches to discourse parsing in an attempt to address this empirical problem. I will discuss corpus construction and learning methods, leaning on the results of the Penn Discourse Tree Bank, Graph Bank, and the SDRT annotation projects DISCOR and ANNODIS.