LingLunch : Gerhard Schaden

Gerhard Schaden (Université de Lille/ en délégation au LLF)
Inferences in Pragmatics and Sociolinguistics

Both pragmatics and sociolinguistics can be seen as dealing with inferences based on utterances. Generally, these are treated separately. In my talk, I will present an attempt of combining both types of inferences and their interaction in one framework, namely Schulz von Thun's theory of communication. I will show how this framework allows to account for non-cooperative inferences, and apply the framework to some examples of argumentative discourse. I will argue that these are cases which resist analyses based on semantics alone, and crucially require the integration of both persona-based inferences, and more standard pragmatic inferences.