[PLing] Vortrag Edgar Onea, 30.11.

[Viola Schmitt]

Liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen,

wir laden herzlich alle ganz herzlich zu einem Vortrag von Edgar Onea 
(Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz) ein. Der Titel des Vortrags lautet 
`Mild rationality and communicative success. The case of focus 
exhaustivity' (Abstract s.u.).

Der Vortrag findet am Freitag den 30.11. um 15 Uhr im SR 3 des Instituts 
für Sprachwissenschaft (Sensengasse 3a, 1090 Wien) statt.

Viele Grüße,


Daniel Büring & Viola Schmitt



Dear colleagues,

everyone is cordially invited to a talk by Edgar Onea 
(Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz). The title of the talk is `Mild 
rationality and communicative success. The case of focus exhaustivity' 
(see below for abstract).

The talk will take place on Friday, Nov 11, at 3 pm in the seminar room 
3 of the department of linguistics (Sensengasse 3a, 1090 Wien).

Best,

Daniel Büring & Viola Schmitt


ABSTRACT

Mild rationality and communicative success. The case of focus 
exhaustivity.

In successful communication, the literal meaning of linguistic 
utterances is often
enriched by pragmatic inferences. Part of the pragmatic reasoning 
underlying such
inferences has been successfully modelled as Bayesian goal recognition 
in the recently
developed Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework (Frank and Goodman 2012). 
In
such a framework, the remarkable reliability of linguistic communication 
arguably
boils down to the underlying rationality of speaker and addressee in the 
probabilistic
inferencing process. This begs the question whether complexity of 
computational
tasks will impact communicative success.
In this paper we model the interpretation of question-answer sequences 
with narrow
focus in the answer in the RSA framework, thereby exploring the effect 
of
computational complexity on interpretation. We present experimental data 
that
suggest that the RSA reasoning appears to be applied imperfectly by 
interlocutors,
but still leading to communicative success. We suggest a theoretical 
model in which
communicative success uses rational reasoning as  a starting point only, 
whereas actual
success may rely on the predicted rather than the correct  reasoning of 
interlocutors.