Guest speaker: Yasutada Sudo (University College London)

We are very pleased to welcome Yasutada Sudo, who is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at University College London and who works on semantics, pragmatics, and syntax. His talk, "Implicatures with discourse referents", will be taking place on Monday, December 2, from 10:30 AM through 12 PM, in OISE 8280.

Theories of discourse anaphora represent discourse referents separately from propositional content (Karttunen 1976, Heim 1982, Kamp 1983, etc.). It is then natural to expect information about discourse referents to be relevant for pragmatic inferences, but most current theories of pragmatics seem to ignore it. In this talk I will look at some cases of implicatures where information about discourse referents gives rise to non-trivial effects, and discuss possible ways in which pragmatic reasoning refers to discourse referents.