Experimental Pragmatics: Advancing Theory and Method Special Session at the 27th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing

理解人类如何运用语用原则来促进交流是理解人类互动的一个重要因素。实验语用学的研究近年来取得了显著的理论进展。目前的工作不仅成功地模拟了语言结构和视觉上可获得的语境影响，而且还模拟了涉及的对话者、他们作为个体和在互动时可获得的世界知识以及他们相互维持的信念和意图等因素。该领域的最新进展可以与研究人员利用新方法的能力联系起来，例如挖掘社交媒体中的多对话者文本交互，通过电子手段（如短信，互联网博客和其他基于网络的平台）产生和理解的网络爬行语言，以及通过Mechanical Turk收集数据。这些方法扩大了现有的可测试假设以及所研究语言数据的多样性和代表性。语用学理论家也特别愿意将实验结果的见解纳入语言解释的发展理论中。第27届美国城市大学人类句子处理年会将于2014年3月在俄亥俄州哥伦布市的俄亥俄州立大学举行，会议将包括一个关于实验语用学的特别会议，旨在评估这一新兴子领域的最新进展，并为该领域的未来研究制定议程。特别会议的核心是邀请六位杰出的研究人员进行一系列的演讲，这些研究人员在性别和学术资历方面各不相同，并具有相关的专业知识。总之，演讲者代表了广泛的理论和方法方法（语料库语言学以及实验研究；语言习得以及成人加工；言语感知以及量词和回指加工）。这次特别会议有望对语用影响的运作及其与语言能力和表现的其他方面的相互作用提供更全面的了解，我们相信这将导致对人类思维如何代表和处理语言的更现实和更具代表性的了解。

Understanding how humans employ pragmatic principles to facilitate communication is an important element in understanding human interaction. Research in experimental pragmatics has shown marked recent theoretical progress. Current work successfully models not only contextual influences from linguistic structure and visually available context, but also factors such as the interlocutors involved, the world knowledge available to them as individuals and as they interact, and their mutually sustained beliefs and intentions. Recent progress in the field can be linked to researchers' ability to leverage novel methods, such as mining multi-interlocutor text interactions in social media, web-crawling language produced and understood via electronic means such as texting, internet blogs and other web-based platforms, and collecting data via Mechanical Turk. These approaches have expanded the available testable hypotheses as well as the diversity and representativeness of the language data under study. Pragmatics theorists have also been particularly open to incorporating insights from experimentally-generated results into developing theories of language interpretation. The 27th Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference, to be held in March 2014 at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, will include a Special Session on Experimental Pragmatics that aims to take stock of recent progress in this burgeoning sub-field and help to set the agenda for future research in this domain.The core of the special session is a series of invited talks by six prominent researchers, diverse with respect to gender and academic seniority, with relevant expertise. Together, the speakers represent a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches (corpus linguistics as well as experimental studies; language acquisition as well as adult processing; speech perception as well as the processing of quantifiers and anaphora). The special session promises to provide a fuller understanding of the operation of pragmatic influences and their interaction with other aspects of linguistic competence and performance that we believe will lead to a more realistic and representative picture of how the human mind represents and processes language.