18h00
Write to cocoa-info at services.cnrs.fr for the zoom link.
Merci de nous contacter à cocoa-info arobase services.cnrs.fr for the zoom link.
Join us for COCOA, Converging on Causal Ontology Analyses.
Merci de nous rejoindre à COCOA, Converging On Causal Ontology Analyses.
Note that the time of this meeting is one hour later than usual!
Notez bien: l'heure de la réunion est retardée d'une heure par rapport à l'heure habituelle!
Michael Franke (Tübingen) The pragmatics of communicating causal information
Knowledge of causal processes is vital for all aspects of our lives. Yet, while strong evidence for causal relations requires systematic intervention, much of our causal knowledge is acquired not from individual experience or direct experimentation, but indirectly from cultural transmission via language. From this point of view, it is very curious that relatively little work in (formal/experimental) pragmatics has addressed the problem of communicating causal information. This talk therefore introduces a probabilistic model of communicating causal information, in which speakers choose utterances to inform listeners about causal facts, and in which listeners reason about alternative causal models based on the usual conversational assumptions of informative and relevant information exchange. The model shows how listeners can be justified to infer causal information reliably from expressions, like indicative conditionals or statements like "A is associated with B", which arguably do not encode this information in their semantic meaning. Building critically but constructively on prior work by Gershman & Ullman 2023), we present novel experimental evidence that causal enrichments in the interpretation of "A is associated with B" are indeed a pragmatic inference.
Kyle Jerro (SUSD) Direct causation and pluractionality in Lubukusu causatives
Like many Bantu languages, Lubukusu (Kenya) has two morphological causatives: -y and –isy. In many languages multiple causatives mark degrees of directness (Comrie 1985), while in others, the meanings of these forms have merged with other functions (e.g., syncretism with the instrumental applicative in Kinyarwanda; Jerro 2017). In this talk, I describe the readings associated with the two morphological causatives and show that they differ in iterativity; the -y suffix marks a single, direct causing event, while the -isy form marks pluractional, direct causation. The talk looks at the semantics of directness and plurality of events in light of these forms, with the aim of situating the contrast in a broader typology of direct vs. indirect causation.
