Creative Discourse Workshop
by CRC 1646 projects B01 & B03 Workshop. Bielefeld: 20-21 Nov 2025
Creative Discourse - beyond Discourse Expectations and Implicit Meaning
Workshop description
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
- Alexadra Spalek
Alexadra Spalek is an associate Professor in Spanish language and Head of Education at University of Oslo.
She studies the distinctive features of human language that facilitate the creation and communication of complex meanings, with a specialization in natural language semantics and a focus on lexical semantics. Her research examines the internal semantic structures of words and their interactions within larger linguistic frameworks, identifying which aspects of word meaning are grammatically relevant versus idiosyncratic across and within languages. Website
- Beáta Gyuris
Beáta Gyuris is a senior research fellow at the Institute for General and Hungarian Linguistics. She studies formal semantics and pragmatics. Her current work focuses on topics at the interfaces of semantics and pragmatics, including information structure, pragmatic markers, sentence types and speech acts. She also participates in projects investigating questions in syntax, prosody or psycholinguistics. Website
- Hans-Martin Gärtner
Hans-Martin Gärtner is a research group leader and research professor at the Institute for General and Hungarian Linguistics.
His current research there is at the meeting points of grammar and pragmatics. It explores the connection between sentence types (in particular, interrogatives, conditionals, hortatives, special and minor types, fragments) and speech acts (in particular, question acts, commissives, indirectness, explicit performatives, joint commitment and bias). Special attention is paid to aspects of clause combining (embedded root phenomena, mood choice, finiteness), and additional diagnostic phenomena (e.g. particles and negation). Various discourse/usage modes are taken into account (e.g. legal language, religious language, dialogue, signs/gestures). Website
- Natasha Korotkova
Natasha Korotkova is an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University, where she is a researcher at the Language, Logic and Information group at the Institute for Language Sciences and teach in the Liberal Arts and Sciences program at the University College Utrecht.
She is a theoretical linguist with strong interests in philosophy. Her research lies mainly at the intersection of formal semantics, formal pragmatics and philosophy of language, with forays into syntax, prosody, and epistemology, and always has a firm cross-linguistic component. Website
- Manfred Krifka
Manfred Krifka was until September 2022 the director of the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS) and also held a professorship at the Institute for German Language and Linguistics at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
He investigates aspects of linguistic meaning and usage with formal and experimental methods and investigates oceanic languages. His main areas of research are linguistic semantics, pragmatics, language typology and Melanesian languages. He has done substantial works on the meaning of nouns, in particular mass nouns and count nouns, on grammatical aspect, generic sentences, polarity items and negation, quantification and vagueness, information structure, anaphora, discourse, questions, response particles and speech acts. Website
- Roberto G. de Almeida
Roberto G. de Almeida is a Professor of Psychology at Concordia University of Montreal
His research interests are the nature of mental representations (i.e., how the mind/brain represents information; more specifically, semantic or conceptual representations), psycholinguistics (mostly on verbs and their role in sentence comprehension) and interfaces between linguistic and conceptual systems, and between language and vision. His empirical and theoretical research investigates more specific issues within these areas, involving diverse methods and populations, such as verb meaning, metaphors, compositionality, language-vision interface, and semantic deficits in Alzheimer's. Website
Venue
The workshop takes place at Bielefeld University. All activities take place in the main building of the University (number 10 on the campus map).
For navigation, use this address:
Bielefeld University
Universitätsstraße 25
D-33615 Bielefeld
- by train
by train:
You can reach Bielefeld by long-distance trains and regional trains. They will take you to the mainstation, Bielefeld Hauptbahnhof.
From Bielefeld Hauptbahnhof take tram line 4 in the direction of Lohmannshof to the stop Universität (journey time 7 minutes; every 10 mins).
For the timetable for your time of arrival, check here.- by car
by car:
From the north:
Motorway A2: Exit Bi-Ost, Detmolder Str. direction Zentrum (6 km, approx. 10 min). Way via Kreuzstr., Oberntorwall, Stapenhorststr., Kurt-Schumacher-Str. (is signposted).From the south:
Motorway A2: At the Bielefeld junction, take the A33 towards Bi-Zentrum, exit at Bi-Zentrum, follow the signs to the city centre on Ostwestfalendamm (B61), exit at Universität, follow Stapenhorststr., Kurt-Schumacher-Str. (is signposted).- by plane
Closest airports are Düsseldorf (190 km from Bielefeld), Dortmund (110km from Bielefeld), Hanover (110 km from Bielefeld), Cologne-Bonn (200 km from Bielefeld) and Frankfurt am Main (320 km from Bielefeld). All of them can be reached (with mostly only one change) by train. For more details, click here.