Single Review on past events

Situations in which we say things that we don’t actually mean – and we mean things that we don’t actually say – are Sven L<link https: www.zukunftskolleg.uni-konstanz.de people personen-details lauer-sven-2425>auer’s special field. The linguist and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg works on pragmatic inferences, inferences that we draw when listening to someone speak, and more specifically inferences that we draw from utterances that have a meaning beyond their literal meaning. Everyday life is full of those ‘conversational implicatures’, as the philosopher of language Paul Grice first called those inferences. In his Jour Fixe talk on May 8, Lauer gave the example of Bob and Paul who share an apartment. Bob is listening to loud music, when Paul peaks into his room and says: ”Hey, I really need to get some sleep.” Bob, just as everyone else, will be able to understand that Paul’s utterance is a request to turn the music down. Traditionally, those implicatures have been assumed to be optional and cancelable: it depends on the context if an inference can or cannot be drawn from the same utterance; and the same context can or cannot produce an inference. While current theories challenge this traditional assumption, Lauer argues that this assumption is correct – especially in situations where speakers have a choice of how they express themselves. Thus, while from an utterance like “Bob want’s a poodle” we conclude that Bob wants a dog, we usually assume that if “Paul wants a free iphone”, he does not necessarily want an iphone, Lauer argued, followed by a lively discussion among the audience about the meaning of those utterances.