IRIS Insights #6 with Prof. Judith Tonhauser

Inferring speaker presuppositions

To fully understand the meaning of a speaker’s utterance, we as interpreters have to understand not just what the speaker is explicitly conveying but also which information they are presupposing, that is, assuming to be true. For instance, if we overhear a speaker utter “My friend doesn’t know that the store is closed“, we may take them to presuppose that the store is closed and explicitly convey that their friend doesn’t know this. The question of how speaker presuppositions are derived has captivated linguists and philosophers of language for decades.

In this talk, IRIS-member Prof. Dr. Judith Tonhauser will introduce a novel theory of presuppositions, one on which interpreters infer a speaker’s presuppositions by reasoning about utterance informativity relative to private speaker assumptions. The theory, which is formalized as a computational cognitive model, is able to incorporate information from linguistic knowledge, such as lexical meaning, as well as communicative pressures and subjective beliefs about the world. On the empirical side, the theory is motivated by the results of behavioral experiments on English and other languages that show that interpreters’ inferences about speaker presuppositions are indeed modulated by linguistic knowledge, communicative pressures, and subjective beliefs alike.

This is a WebEx talk to which everyone who is interested is cordially invited. It will take place in English. Our IRIS speaker, Prof. Maria Wirzberger, will moderate it. Following Prof. Judith Tonhauser's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. We look forward to active participation.

About the speaker: Judith Tonhauser is a professor of English Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart. She investigates natural language meaning using a combination of behavioral experiments and theoretical modeling. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University in 2006 and a Diploma in Computational Linguistics from the University of Stuttgart in 2000. She was an Assistant, Associate, and Full professor at The Ohio State University from 2006 to 2019, and a visiting researcher at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University from 2013-14 and at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft from 2014-15. She currently serves as Vice Rector for Early Career Researchers and Diversity at the University of Stuttgart.

[Picture: SRF IRIS / S. Brandes]