Slides

Background Readings

• Daniel W. Harris: Intention Recognition as the Mechanism of Human Communication
  (In this paper I spend more time on the methodological differences between earlier Griceans and the approach that I have been taking, including in this book.)
• Peter Godfrey-Smith: Reduction in Real Life
  (This paper summarizes some methodological ideas that I think are really helpful, having to do with the use of idealized models and the goal of giving mechanistic explanations. Another paper on idealization that I have found very useful is Michael Weisberg's "Three Kinds of Idealization".)

We won't have class this week, as I will be out of town. But this would be a good chance to read some of the background readings for the next few weeks. I would especially recommend reading the the things by Bratman, Grice, and Fodor that are listed below.

Slides

Required Reading

• Daniel W. Harris: Human Communication, Ch.1: Intention Recognition and its Psychological Underpinnings
  (This chapter gives an overview of the theory of communication defended in the book.)

Background Readings

• H. P. Grice: Meaning
  (A classic!)
• Stephen Neale: This, That, and the Other
  (I really like this whole paper, but is quite long, and the most relevant part for us is Section 2 ("Linguistic Pragmatism," pp.71–91). This is a very concise statement of Neale's big-picture view about how we ought to pursue the Gricean project.)
• Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson: Relevance: Communication and Cognition
  (This book is one of the earliest attempts to turn Grice's ideas into a cognitive-scientific theory of approximately the kind I am interested in. I recommend reading Chapter 1 in particular, which is a really nice overview of their project and its relationship to Grice. I disagree with plenty of it, but it gives an interesting sense of different ways that this sort of project could be pursued.)

Slides

Required Reading

• Daniel W. Harris: Human Communication, Ch.2: Designing Communicative Acts
  (This chapter argues that we have to posit communicative intentions in order to explain humans' capacity to design their communicative acts for addressees, which is very valuable!)

Background Readings

• Michael Bratman: Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason
  (This is Bratman's 1987 book. It's a great book in general, but the main part I would suggest reading is Chapter 3: Plans and Practical Reasoning. This spells out the theory of intentions and plans that I draw on in Chapter 2.)

Slides

Required Reading

• Daniel W. Harris: Human Communication, Ch.3: Planning conversations together
  (An argument that we reveal our intentions to one another in order to reap the benefits of cooperative joint planning, which also underpins numerous other communicatively valuable features of human communication.)

Background Readings

• Michael Bratman: Shared Cooperative Activity
  (This is Bratman's original statement of his theory of shared planning and shared intentions. For the longer, more detailed and up-to-date version, see his book, Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together. I draw heavily on Bratman's theory in Chapter 3.)
• Paul Grice: Logic and Conversation
  (This is an incredibly influential paper in which Grice gives his theory of implicature. A crucial part of this theory is the idea that conversation ia a rationally cooperative joint activity that is governed by shared goals. In the main reading, I try to say more about what this means.)
• Craige Roberts: Information Structure in Discourse: Towards an Integrated Formal Theory of Pragmatics
  (This is Roberts' influential articulation and defense of her question-under-discussion-based model of conversation. In the main reading, I try to argue that this model's success is due to its being an idealized model of certain recurring patterns in our plans for conversations.)
• John MacFarlane: Vagueness as Indecision
  (Here MacFarlane argues that at least some context sensitivity is sensitivity to shared plans. His case study is gradable adjectives (e.g. "big" and "bald"), and he argues that their vagueness is a kind of indecision. This is another of my case studies in Chapter 3.)

Slides

Required Reading

• Daniel W. Harris: Human Communication, Ch.4: Mindreading in Human Communication
  (In this chapter I argue that human communication relies on lots of mindreading, even though we often aren't conscious of doing it, and even though it is cognitively demanding.)

Background Readings

• Robert Hawkins, Hyowon Gweon, and Noah D. Goodman: The division of labor in communication: Speakers help listeners account for asymmetries in visual perspective
  (This is a great recent paper surveying and adding to the evidence about perspective-sensitivity in how we design and interpret noun phrases, and building a Bayesian model of how we do it. The evidence and model presented here both figure prominently in my Chapter 4.)
• Judith Degen: The Rational Speech Act Framework
  (This is an overview of the "rational speech act framework," which is an increasingly influential way of formally modeling pragmatic reasoning using Bayesian, game-theoretic tools. Some of its practitioners refer to it as "Grice with math." The model used by Hawkins et al is based in this framework.)
• Evan Westra and Jennifer Nagel: Mindreading in Conversation
  (This paper argues that the default kind of mindreading used in linguistic communication is factive mindreading (e.g. knowledge attributio), which lowers cognitive demands on communicators. I respond to this and some other theoretical strategies for predicting a lower cognitive burden on communicators in Chapter 4.)
• Mark K. Ho, Rebecca Saxe, and Fiery Cushman: Planning with Theory of Mind
  (This is a recent survey of cognitive scientific work on how to integrate what we know about planning and mindreading.)

Slides

Required Reading

• Daniel W. Harris and Elmar Unnsteinsson: Genre and Conversation
  (This is a paper that Elmar and I have been working on. We argue that there are non-conventional differences in conversational genre (e.g. informational vs. practical, committal vs. exploratory, factual vs. fictional, cooperative vs. adversarial), and that these dimensions of variation can be understood in terms of patterns in the structures of the plans that govern conversations.)

Background Readings

• There is quite a lot of overlap with my Chapter 3, so the background readings for that chapter would be good to read for this too, if you haven't already.

This week we'll have a visit from Paula Rubio-Fernandez, who has been doing important empirical and theoretical work on several of the issues we've been thinking about this semester, most importantly the role of mindreading in communication and the relationship between language and extralinguistic cognition. Paula will come prepared to answer questions about her work, and I will share your weekly writing with her before class so that she can think about what to say in response. I am assigning three of her papers, which give a sense of some of the range of her recent work. Please read at least one of these (start with whichever seems most interesting), but try to read all three if possible. Combined, they add up to 27 pages (not including bibliographies).

Readings

• Paula Rubio-Fernandez: Cultural Evolutionary Pragmatics: Investigating the Codevelopment and Coevolution of Language and Social Cognition
  This is a statement of Paula's theoretical vision that ties her recent work together and explains some of the ambitions of her research program.
• Julian Jara-Ettinger and Paula Rubio-Fernandez: Quantitative mental state attributions in language understanding
  This paper uses data from reference-game tasks to motivate a Bayesian model of communicative mindreading. (Note that Paula was the experimentalist here and Jara-Ettinger was the Bayesian modeler, and so she'll have less to say about the gory details of the model than about the other parts of the paper.)
• Paula Rubio-Fernandez: The director task: A test for Theory-of-Mind use or selective attention?
  This paper uses data taken from variations on the director task to argue that the task has been widely misinterpreted. It also suggests some interesting lessons and further questions about which cognitive resources may be constrained in communicative mindreading.

Required Reading

• Daniel W. Harris: Human Communication, Ch.5: Background Information and Common Ground

Background Readings

• Robert Stalnaker: Common Ground
  (This is one of Stalnaker's influential attempts to articulate the common-ground model. The classic is his paper Assertion, and a more recent articulation is his book, Context.)
• Herbert H. Clark: Common Ground
  (Clark is a psychologist who did a bunch of empirical and theoretical research that built on and supported the common-ground model. This is a chapter from his book, Using Language, much of which is really interesting.)
• Daphna Heller and Sarah Brown-Schmidt: The Multiple Perspectives Theory of Mental States in Communication
  (A recent empirical attack on common-ground models.)
• Daniel W. Harris: We Talk to People, not Contexts
  (My chapter 5 builds on this paper. I am putting it here just in case...)

Required Reading

• Daniel W. Harris: Human Communication, Ch.6: Discourse Referents as Object Files
  

Background Readings

• Lauri Karttunen: Discourse Referents
• Irene Heim: File Change Semantics and the Familiarity Theory of Indefinites
• E. J. Green and Jake Quilty-Dunn: What is an Object File?
• Michael Murez, Joulia Smortchkova, and Brent Strickland: The Mental Files Theory of Singular Thought
• Tyler Knowlton, John Trueswell, and Anna Papafragou: Keeping quantifier meaning in mind: Connecting semantics, cognition, and pragmatics

Required Reading

• Daniel W. Harris: Human Communication, Ch.7: Natural-Language Semantics and Cognitive Architecture

Background Readings

• Daniel W. Harris: Semantics without Semantic Content
  (Some of the main arguments in the chapter will build on the arguments in this paper. It gets into the formal-semantic weeds in Section 4, but that is also the least important part of the paper for our purposes, so feel free to ignore it, particularly if you haven't done much semantics before.)
• Jerry Fodor: Précis of The Modularity of Mind
  (This is a short summary of Fodor's classic book on cognitive architecture. If you can find the time, do yourself a favor and read the whole book.
• Fernanda Ferreira and James Nye: The Modularity of Sentence Processing Reconsidered.pdf
  (This is a recent survey of the empirical evidence for and against the modularity of sentence processing.)

Required Reading

• Daniel W. Harris: Human Communication, Ch.8: Polysemy, Language, and Thought

Background Readings

• Michael Glanzberg: Explanation and Partiality in Semantics
• Ingrid Falkum and Agustin Vicente: Polysemy: Current Perspectives
• Jake Quilty-Dunn: Polysemy and Thought: Toward a Generative Theory of Concepts
• Mahesh Srinivasan and Hugh Rabagliati: How concepts and conventions structure the lexicon: Cross-linguistic evidence from polysemy

Required Reading

• Daniel W. Harris and Karen Lewis: Situational variation in the cognitive demands of communication
  (This is a paper that Karen and I have been working on. We argue that different conversational situations place systematically different cognitive demands on communicators, and we try to develop a taxonomy of the different dimensions of variation. We use communicating on twitter as an example of a perfect storm.)

Background Readings

• TBD

Required Reading

• Daniel W. Harris: Human Communication, Ch.9: Verbal working memory
  

Background Readings

• Alan Baddeley: Working Memory: Theories, Models, and Controversies
• Jonathan Winawer, Nathan Witthoft, Michael C. Frank, Lisa Wu, Alex R. Wade, and Lera Boroditsky: Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination