Principal Investigators:

• Craige Roberts, Linguistics (formal semantics and pragmatics)
• Donna Byron, Computer Science and Engineer (pragmatic factors in language processing by computer)
• Scott Schwenter, Spanish and Portuguese (classical pragmatics, with special emphasis on Spanish/Portuguese)

The OSU Pragmatics Initiative aims to deepen ongoing graduate study and research at OSU in the field of pragmatics, broadly construed as the study of how context affects language use and interpretation. Pragmatics has ramifications not only for linguistic theory and the philosophy of language, but also for interpersonal communication, language teaching, the computational implementation of natural language systems, and for the study within psychology of how we produce and process speech.

The initiative aims to exploit and enhance existing ties between faculty and departments. As a means to that end, we have a weekly Pragmatics Study Group that meets to discuss our work. We also have a speakers' series in 2004-2006, with nine outside speakers from the fields of computer science, linguistics, philosophy and psychology.

In addition to the faculty coordinating the initiative, pragmatics is closely related to the interests of a number of other faculty across several departments in the university, including:

• CIS: Eric Fosler-Lussier
• English: Gabriella Modan
• Linguistics: Mary Beckman, Chris Brew, David Dowty, Detmar Meurers, Shari Speer
• Philosophy: Louise Antony, Stephen Boer, Robert Kraut, Diana Raffman, William Taschek, Neal Tennant
• Psychology: Gail McKoon, Mark Pitts
• Spanish and Portuguese: Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach