The workshop is a collaboration between two projects of the Bielefeld Collaborative Research Center 1646 „Linguistic Creativity in Communication“ and deals with the phenomenon of semantic or pragmatic enrichment, that is, the ways in which the meaning of an utterance exceeds its literal content.

In Project B01, Coercion as a creative mechanism in compositional interpretation, enrichment is investigated for the phenomenon of complement coercion. Important questions in B01 concern the conditions under which enrichment occurs and whether enrichment is semantic or pragmatic in nature.

Project B03, Indirectness in discourse: Interrogatives, implicit meaning and incongruence, explores pragmatic enrichment in indirect speech acts and answer avoidance in political interviews, for instance, the question of how indirect replies are used to convey implicit meaning.

In both projects, creativity is linked to pragmatic interpretation: Listeners use context, knowledge of discursive strategies and expectations in order to reconstruct non-obvious meaning. Thus, both projects answer the following research questions in their own way:

• How does language allow us to understand more than what is literally said, and what is the cognitive and formal basis of this ability?
• What are the limits for this enrichment of meaning?
• What linguistic choices and strategies are particularly creative on the part of the speaker, and which ones allow the addressee to be creative?

Invited speakers:

• Alexandra Spalek (Oslo)
• Beáta Gyuris (Budapest)
• Hans-Martin Gärtner (Budapest)
• Natasha Kortokova (Utrecht)
• Manfred Krifka (Berlin)
• Roberto G. de Almeida (Montreal)