News Release

A workshop on semantics, pragmatics and rhetoric to be held in the Basque Country

The aims of the speaker's acts of speech are one of the salient points of focus of the research team organizing the international event

Book Announcement

Elhuyar Fundazioa

What kind of communication exists between two people who, without a word passing between them, paint a wall together? How do we manage to transmit a whole message with just one word? How is it possible that two persons have totally different opinions about the taste of a banana, and neither is wrong? Is irony always negative?

The University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)'s Language as Action: Semantics, Pragmatics and Rhetoric research team is seeking answers to these questions. "We are investigating everything related to meaning, communication and the use of language", explained Dr Kepa Korta, director of the team. He is a specialist in the Philosophy of Language, Semantics and Pragmatics, and works together with researchers from the areas of Philosophy, Linguistics and Mathematics, amongst others. The group is based at the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language and Information (ILCLI) of the UPV/EHU, in the Basque city of Donostia-San Sebastián (shortly to move to the Carlos Santamaria building at the UPV/EHU campus in the Basque province of Gipuzkoa). Dr Korta is also the director of the ILCLI.

Book on critical pragmatics

The three pillars of the team are semantics, pragmatics and rhetoric. "They define meaning from three perspectives. The first, the meaning of words (semantics). The second, what we mean when we utter a sentence (pragmatics). And the third, the way in which we try to change the mental states of others through the words we utter (persuasion, rhetoric)", explained Dr Korta. It is precisely pragmatics that is the most relevant for the team: "Seeing language as action. Language can be seen as something which is defined by the words found in dictionaries or as a function of our grammatical norms, but we see it in a different manner. This is all about verbal communication: what we mean goes beyond the meaning of the words, and sometimes it is completely different".

Explaining the theory they call "critical pragmatics", a book will shortly be published entitled Critical Pragmatics. An Inquiry into Reference and Communication (Cambridge University Press), written by Dr Korta, together with Professor John Perry, collaborator of the team and professor at Stanford and Riverside universities in California. In Dr Korta's opinion, this book is hopefully going to have significant impact on their research area: "We have given shape to a pragmatic theory about Reference; how we refer to objects, places or people, which words we use to this end and how we manage to transmit what we are talking about, often without even words".

Moreover, some of the team's researchers aim to apply this theory to other areas. Dr Joana Garmendia analyses how communication occurs in the case of irony. Dr Eros Corazza, meanwhile, reflects on whether fictional names are stripped of references or whether they can be considered indicative of content. The joint research by Dr María Ponte and Dr Korta is similar to the above, but it is focused on reference to time: if a person said yesterday that they were going to win the lottery and this does not happen, is this preterit utterance now false?

International congress in November

The team has external collaborators and foreign researchers, as well as local team members who work abroad. One example of the latter is Dr Larraitz Zubeldia, who recently presented her PhD thesis and is now at the Department of Linguistics of University College London (UCL).

This international make-up is one of the hallmarks of the team, working principally in English. In fact, English is the language of the ILCLI International Workshop on Semantics, Pragmatics and Rhetoric (SPR-11). "This is of great importance to our international relations", explained Dr Korta. Held every three years, the next workshop will be from the 9th to the 11th of November of this year in Donostia-San Sebastián. The team is currently immersed in its organisation, and various researchers from universities such as UCL, Oxford and Stanford have already confirmed their attendance to present lectures and papers. "We are also known for this – organising good conferences".

Gogoa, journal in Basque

They work in English "because the first league, as it were, of research in this discipline is played in English", but they try to make space for Basque whenever possible. Fruit of these efforts is Gogoa, a journal for research into language, knowledge and communication, and published by ILCLI. "We created this precisely so that Euskera (Basque language) would not be sidelined, in order to deal with scientific text in this ambit also", explained Dr Korta. They are happy about the result, even if Korta is critical of the way the Basque language is treated in research matters, as it is not easy for a text written in Basque to have repercussion: "The evaluating agencies, including the Basque ones, do not give importance to articles written in Euskera. Be they the worst or the best in the world - they just do not bother about the content".

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