Brandeis University
Spring 2004

Time: Tuesday, 1:30pm - 4:30pm
Location: Volen 101

Staff

Professor:James Pustejovsky
258 Volen Center, jamesp@cs.brandeis.edu, (781) 736 2709
Office hours: Wed., Fri. 10:00 am - 12:00 pm

Course Description

What is pragmatics and how is it represented? Pragmatics is usually seen as the study of how language is used, and what effect context has on the interpretation of our linguistic expressions. In this course, we will examine theories of lexical semantics and discourse structure, as they relate to the construction of a general view of pragmatic use and grounding of language by speakers. General topics include deixis, anaphora, presupposition, implicatures, speech acts, and conversational structure, with special attention to the semantics/pragmatics interface, connectives in logic and natural language, and discourse markers. Also covered will be the structure of narrative and the temporal interpretation of texts.

Reference Materials

• Readings:
  
  Course Reading Library
  

  Assignment Instructions

  Review Assignments are analytic summaries of the readings for the current week. Every student is required to submit a 2 page summary for every paper assigned. They are due in class. In addition, each week, a student (or pair) will be assigne to present the material in 15-25 minute presentation format. If you are presenting, then I will need a .ppt or pdf version of your presentation to post on the webpage.
  Final Project Paper will be due the final week of classes. This is a 15-20 page analytic report on one of the topics covered in the class. More detail on paper structure will be given in class.
  

  Grading

  • Review Assignments: 50% of the grade.
    
  • Presentations of Reviews: 20% of the grade
    
  • Final Project Paper: 30% of the grade
    

  Syllabus

  Date	Topic	Readings	Lecture Notes
  			Handout
  1/20/04	What is pragmatics?
  1/27/04	Lexical Knowledge	Pustejovsky and Boguraev (1993)	Slides
  2/03/04	Abduction and Commonsense	Hobbs et al. (1993)
  2/10/04	Speech Acts	Bach: The Semantics-Pragmatics Distinction Bach: Speech Acts Smith The History of Speech Acts
  2/24/04	Presupposition I	Asher and Lascardies: Indirect Speech Acts	Roser Sauri's Slides
  3/02/04	Presupposition II	Bach: You Don't Say Recanati: What is Said
  3/09/04	CLASS CANCELLED
  3/16/04	Coherence in Discourse: Contextualism	Stanley: Linguistic Basis for Contextualism Carston: Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction: View from Relevance Theory
  3/30/04	Text Coherence I	Morris and Hirst: Lexical Cohesion computed by Thesaurus Relations Grosz, Joshi, and Weinstein: Centering: A Framework for Modeling Coherence
  4/15/04	Pragmatics of Language Generation	Barzilay and Lee: Catching the Drift, Probabilistic Context Models Reiter and Dale: Fast Algorithm for Generating Referrring Expressions References to Named Entities: A Corpus Study
  4/20/04	Time in Discourse	TimeML and Temporal Discourse Models
  4/27/04	The Pragmatics of Word Learning	Bloom: How Children Learn the Meaning of Words Gorniak and Roy: Grounded Semantics	SLIDES
  5/04/04	Dynamic Semantics for Narratives	Reiter: Narratives as Programs Stone: Communicative Intent

  Related Links

      Computational Semantics

  • Barzilay's Computational Models of Discourse
  • Claire Gardent's Homepage
  • Lascarides's Homepage