20-24 July 2009, ViC 2009: Vagueness in Communication, Bordeaux, France

Although vagueness has long since been an important topic in philosophy, logic and linguistics, some recent advances have made the functions of vagueness in natural language communication an exciting and timely research area. This renewed interest has a distinct cross-disciplinary character and has spawned many new research questions. While the classical instruments of dealing with vagueness have not been significantly extended, new approaches investigate questions like context-sensitivity of vagueness, the sharpening of vague predicates in context, and the modeling of precision levels with expressions like 'roughly' or 'like'. On a more fundamental level, the question why there is vagueness to begin with, what role vagueness serves in human communication, has been addressed. Game-theoretic methods have been employed that show that being vague or imprecise can be beneficial for communication even if the speaker could truthfully use more precise terms (de Jaegher 2003). Furthermore, the important role of vagueness became evident in a number of empirical domains beyond obvious examples such as the language of diplomacy.

The ViC-2009 workshop is part of the European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2009), and is organised as an event of the VAAG project of the ESF Eurocore LogicCC. It aims to provide a forum for researchers (including advanced PhD students) to present and discuss their work with colleagues and researchers who work in the broad subject of the disciplines relevant for particles and modal adverbs, as represented in ESSLLI.

For more information, see http://www.fit.fraunhofer.de/~hcschmitz/esslli2009/ or contact Rick Nouwen at rnouwen at gmail.com.