Speaker
Professor Manfred Krifka
Leibniz-Centre for General Linguistics in Berlin
Manfred Krifka received his doctoral degree at the University of Munich in 1986, with a dissertation on nominal reference and aspectual classes. He held positions at the University of Tübingen, the University of Texas at Austin, and Humboldt University in Berlin; he was also fellow at the Center for Behavioral Study at Stanford and of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. From 2001 to his retirement in 2023, was director at the Leibniz-Centre for General Linguistics in Berlin (ZAS). He has worked on a wide range of topics in linguistic semantics, including the mass/count distinction, classifier constructions, genericity, information structure, quantification, negative polarity items, vagueness, definiteness and anaphoric reference. In the last decade, his main focus was on the semantics and pragmatics of speech acts, for which he received an ERC Advanced Grant. In this work, he developed an integration of speech acts as the basic units of human communication into models of formal syntax and semantics. He argues for a commitment-based approach to speech acts, and has developed a theory of communication as common ground change that incorporates the possible ways how the common ground can develop. Since 2008, Krifka is also carrying out language documentation on small languages in Vanuatu.
Event Details
Recent work in formal semantics and pragmatics has developed models of how the update of the common ground in conversation is negotiated. One particularly popular framework is the Table Model of Farkas & Bruce (2010) that assumes an automaton next to the common ground with transition rules and the ability to store or delete propositions. I will discuss shortcomings of this framework and propose as an alternative Commitment Spaces (CS, Krifka 2015) that can be understood as traditional common grounds with possible continuations. I will show how assertions and reactions to assertions can be modelled, followed by different types of questions, declarative questions, and disjunctions of assertions and questions. I will also discuss rejections and retractions of previous assertions.
Enquires
lin@cuhk.edu.hk
