Nicholas Allott
Research interests
Pragmatics; inference, reasoning and rationality; semantics of natural languages; Relevance Theory.
Most of my work deals with questions about rationality and communication. I have published (see below) on game theoretic pragmatics; pragmatic illusions; and the role of assumptions about rationality in broadly Gricean pragmatics. I am working on heuristics in utterance interpretation; the semantics and pragmatics of natural language conditionals; and ad hoc concepts.
Publications
Allott, N. & Textor, M. (submitted). Lexical pragmatic adjustment and the nature of ad hoc concepts.
Allott, N. (forthcoming). Relevance theory. In A. Capone, F. Lo Piparo, & M. Carapezza (Eds.), Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy. Berlin/New York: Springer.
Allott, N. (2010). Conference report: ‘Formal Semantics and Pragmatics, 19–21 November’. The Reasoner, 4(12).
Allott, N. (2010) Key Terms in Pragmatics. London: Continuum.
Allott, N. & Uchida, H. (2009). Natural language indicative conditionals are classical. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 21, 1–17.
Allott, N. & Uchida, H. (2009). Classical logic, conditionals and “nonmonotonic” reasoning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(01), 85.
Allott, N. (2008). Pragmatics and rationality. PhD thesis, University of London.
Allott, N. (2006) Game theory and communication. In A. Benz, G. Jäger, & R. van Rooij (eds.), Game Theory and Pragmatics (pp. 123–51). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Allott, N. (2006) The role of misused concepts in manufacturing consent: A cognitive account. In L. de Saussure, & P. Schulz (eds.), Manipulation and Ideologies in the Twentieth Century: Discourse, Language, Mind. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Allott, N. (2005) Paul Grice, reasoning and pragmatics. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 17: 217–43. (Superseded by my thesis)
Allott, N. (2003) Game theory and communication. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 15: 1-33. (Superseded by the version in Benz, Jäger, & van Rooij 2006)
Allott, N. (2002) Relevance and rationality. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 14: 69-82. (Superseded by my thesis)
Allott, N. & Rubio Fernández, P. (2002). This paper fills a much-needed gap. Actes de l’atelier des doctorants en linguistique, Université Paris 7, 97–102.
Conferences and seminars
Past conferences that I have been involved with:
Children's pragmatic and metarepresentational development.
CSMN conference on word meaning
Stalnaker-Lewis semantics for conditionals, particularly 'counterfactual'/'subjunctive' conditionals
Metarepresentation and non-literal language use
Metarepresentation, communication and culture
Recent teaching
Autumn 2011 (now over, but archived for reference)
I taught FIL2206: Thought, interpretation and communication.
Spring 2011 (now over, but archived for reference)
I was the organiser and one of the lecturers on CSMN4021: Pragmatics and relevance theory. The lecture timetable, downloadable lecture notes and reading are available here. The course description is here.
I taught FIL 4461/71/81: Reference, context and speech acts.
Relevance mailing list
Mailing list for announcements and discussion of relevance theory.
I'm the administrator. Here are instructions for using the list.
nor-prag mailing list
Mailing list for pragmatics in Norway.
I am one of the founding owners/moderators. You can sign up here.
(Thanks to Timothy and Chiara for working out how to set up a homepage like this.)
Manage document