Title: A cognitive approach to analyzing procedural meaning and its implications for teaching foreign languages
Presenter: Amel Khalfaoui,  University of Oklahoma
Location: Zoom, Password: iwl

Abstract: 
One key distinction that is focal to our interpretation of human communication is the  conceptual vs. procedural distinction. Conceptual linguistic forms such as university or Mary are developed into conceptual representations of the interpretation that the speaker intends to convey to the hearer. For example ‘Mary’ in ‘Mary is a teacher’ leads the hearer to a specific woman named May. However, as noted by Blakemore (1987), other linguistic expressions such as discourse connectives (e.g., but, so, and after all) do not encode concepts as part of their semantic meaning. Rather, they encode procedures (instructions) which guide the inferential phase of comprehension to facilitate language comprehension. First, this presentation will demonstrate that the discourse connective but and the Tunisian Arabic demonstrative determiner ha are procedural language forms. The connective but informs the hearer that the information that follows it contradicts and eliminates information that is communicated previously or that is available in the context (Blakemore 1987, Iten 2005); and the demonstrative determiner ha informs the hearer that the speaker has an emotional attitude toward the information that follows it (Khalfaoui 2020). Second, the presentation explains that from theoretical perspective (Sperber and Wilson 1995), language forms which encode procedures are important because they explicitly lead the hearer to the intended meaning and, therefore, reduce the amount of the hearer’s processing effort for the purpose of guaranteeing successful communication. Finally, the presentation will discuss some challenges that procedural language forms pose to foreign language learners and propose some pedagogical solutions to these challenges.

Bio: 
Amel Khalfaoui, assistant professor of Arabic Linguistics at the University of Oklahoma. She holds a PhD in Linguistics with a minor in cognitive science from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research interests include pragmatics, grammar-pragmatics interface, and language and cognition, with a focus on referring expressions and discourse markers. In her research, she uses a methodology that combines questionnaires and data collected from different genres such as social media microblogs and folk tales to show how the distribution and interpretation of referring expressions and pragmatic markers can be determined by cognitive and pragmatic factors. she has published in the Journal of Pragmatics , Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics, and  Al’Arabya . She is also co-editor of  two volumes of the John Benjamins Book series Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics. Dr. Khalfaoui has taught a variety of courses in Arabic and linguistics. She is currently serving as an elected officer on the Arabic Linguistics Society Executive Board.