Dr Christina Kim, lecturer in the Faculty of English Language and Linguistics, will be speaking today, as part of the General Linguistics Seminar at the University of Oxford.
The talk is entitled ‘Inferring the Right Alternatives in Pragmatic Processing’ and will look at two cases of semantic context dependence called ‘focus particles’ and ‘relative gradable adjectives’.
Christina will then look at further subclasses of adjectives that vary with their contexts of use, but differ in ways demonstrating the distinction between semantic and pragmatic context dependence. She will also present some preliminary behavioural data that supports such a distinction, and more generally, represents a way of distinguishing different kinds of variability in meaning by their behavioural reflexes.
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