People working in Pragmatics at OSU
Principal Investigators
Roberts' current projects include work on two manuscripts and two
papers on foundational issues in the theory of pragmatics. In
addition to her own work, she is collaborating with Byron and her
student Laura Stoia and with Speer and her associates, and advising
the pragmatics projects of a number of students, including Sharon Ross
and Elizabeth Smith.
Schwenter's current research centers on the pragmatics of negation
across languages, a topic that is intimately tied to presupposition,
the central theme of the proposed project. Several of his articles on
negation have been published or accepted for publication in leading
journals, and he is now preparing the manuscript of a major monograph
on this same topic, to be submitted to Cambridge University
Press. Other recent work deals with the interaction, or lack thereof,
between presupposition accommodation and diachronic semantic change,
in collaboration with Richard Waltereit (U. Tübingen). He is also
participating in several other projects with his six graduate students
working in pragmatics, most relevantly one with PhD student Patrícia
Matos Amaral on the role of pragmatic understatement in the
development of "approximative" adverbials in both English and
Portuguese.
Donna
Byron, OSU Computer Science and Engineering
Byron's team
working in the SLATE lab
in Computer Science and Engineering at OSU has several ongoing
projects related to language interpretation in context that have
benefited from the strong interaction fostered by the Pragmatics
Initiative. The overarching research theme for the lab is interpreting
nominal expressions such as this chair or Mr. Dalrymple in discourse.
To interpret such expressions, the relation between the context and
the exact phrasing chosen for the expression must be modeled. Our
current projects include work on zero anaphors in Korean, and modeling
multi-modal context for situated agents.