Dr Alison Hall

I joined DMU in 2015 and am a VC2020 senior lecturer in English Language. My research interests are pragmatics and philosophy of language, specifically the nature of word meanings and concepts, and how linguistic structure and context interact to convey meaning.

 I would be interested in supervising PhD students in theoretical pragmatics and philosophy of language (e.g. linguistic underdeterminacy, the explicit-implicit distinction in pragmatics, relevance theory/post-Gricean pragmatic theory, the nature of lexical meanings and communicated concepts).

2019. Fragments. In Jeroen van Craenenbroeck and Tanja Temmerman (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Ellipsis, 605-623. Oxford: OUP.

2018. Relevance Theory. In Frank Liedtke and Astrid Tuchen (eds) Handbuch Pragmatik (‘Handbook of Pragmatics’), 87-95. Stuttgart: Metzler.

2017. (co-authored with Robyn Carston) Contextual effects on explicature: Optional pragmatics or optional syntax? International Review of Pragmatics 9(1): 51-81.

2017. Lexical pragmatics, explicature and ad hoc concepts. In I. Depraetere and R. Salkie (eds) Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line, 85-100. Berlin: Springer.

2017. Enrichment. In G. Steen, A. Barron and Y. Gueguo (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics, 341-353. Abingdon & New York: Routledge.

2015. Pragmatics versus semantics. In C. Chapelle (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Online version. Wiley-Blackwell.

2014. 'Free' enrichment and the nature of pragmatic constraints. International Review of Pragmatics 6(1): 1-28.

2013. Relevance theory, semantic content and pragmatic enrichment. In A. Capone, F. Lo Piparo and M. Carapezza (eds) Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy, 99-130. Springer.

2012. (with Robyn Carston) Implicature and explicature. In H.-J. Schmid (ed.) Cognitive Pragmatics, Vol. 4 of Handbooks in Pragmatics, 47-84. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter.

2009. Subsentential utterances, ellipsis, and pragmatic enrichment. Pragmatics & Cognition 17(2): 222-50.

2009. Semantic compositionality and truth-conditional content. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 109(3): 353-64. (Proceedings of the Graduate Sessions at the 2008 Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association.)

2008. Free enrichment or hidden indexicals? Mind & Language 23(4): 426-56.

2007. Do discourse connectives encode concepts or procedures? Lingua 117(1): 149-74.

Pragmatics, philosophy of language, semantics

Linguistics, pragmatics

PhD Linguistics, UCL

MA Linguistics, UCL

BA German and Spanish, Bradford

ELAN1001 Words in Action, ELAN2005 Language in Context, ELAN3000 English Language Dissertation, MA English 

European Society for Philosophy and Psychology

International Pragmatics Association

Upcoming talks:

'Implicature, explicature and commitment', Annual Meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Athens, September 2019

'Pragmatics, levels of meaning, and speaker commitment' (joint work with Diana Mazzarella), Experimental Philosophy Conference, Bern, September 2019

Recent talks:

Context, Communication and Cognition conference, June 2018, Warsaw.

Foundational Issues in Philosophical Semantics conference, May-June 2018, Turin.

Communication, Culture and Cognition conference, May 2018, Seville.

'Pragmatic enrichment, what is said, and minimal propositions'. Invited talk at Cognitive Science Seminar, New College of the Humanities, London, October 2017.

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, UCL Linguistics, 9/2009-6/2013.

Research in Paris funding for postdoctoral fellowship at Institut Jean Nicod (Ecole Normale Superieure), Paris, 9/2010-6/2011.

AHRC PhD funding 2004-2007. 

Faculty Research Leave, January-June 2018.

Regular ad hoc reviewer for journals, including Mind & Language, Journal of Pragmatics, Synthese, Erkenntnis, Dialectica, Topoi, Glossa, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Discourse Processes, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Pragmatics & Cognition, Linguistics and Philosophy, etc.

 Since 2015: Abstract reviewing for Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain