Graduate students and postdocs are encouraged to join the speaker for lunch after the seminar. To sign up for a spot, please email: pennmindcore@sas.upenn.edu 

Ming Xiang
Department of Linguistics
University of Chicago

What are the issues? The effect of question under discussion in language processing

Question under Discussion (QUD) is an influential linguistic construct for modeling the general structure of discourse context. Viewed through the lenses of QUDs, discourse context progresses as a goal-driven process, with interlocutors engaging in cooperative exchanges to resolve relevant issues and, in essence, respond to pertinent QUDs. This talk examines the effect of QUD on language processing. I will first introduce a few case studies based on offline behavioral judgments, which demonstrate how QUDs modulate pragmatic inferences (e.g. scalar implicature calculation) and how they also interact with syntactic structure building (e.g. ellipsis resolution). Next, drawing on findings from the agreement attraction effect (self-paced-reading) I will argue that the incremental update of QUDs may also have the effect of delineating information chunking units, thereby creating event boundaries for working memory encoding and retrieval. Despite the success of using QUDs to account for many linguistics and psycholinguistics observations, there is little work on how to identify them in naturalistic discourse. In the final part of this talk, I will discuss some (very) preliminary results, and the challenges revealed by them, from a recent project that aims to develop experimental and computational methods to more precisely track QUDs and quantify their variability in naturalistic discourse contexts.

A pizza lunch will be served. Please bring your own beverage.

This is a joint seminar with the ILST at Penn.

We will also stream this seminar via Zoom.
For the link, please email: pennmindcore@sas.upenn.edu