
Dr. Sol Azuelos Atias
University of Haifa, Israel
Biography:
Dr. Sol Azuelos-Atias – A linguist at the University of Haifa, she supervises Ph.D. candidates and serves on the scientific committee of the Israel Science Foundation, various Executive Committees, and Editorial Boards (Pragmatics and Society, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law). Her research focuses on the way language is used in the particular circumstances of varied social and historical contexts: from court discussions (legal Hebrew/Arabic/English) to face to face conversations. Her main theoretical focus is Sperber and Wilson’s theory of cognitive linguistics, Relevance Theory: she has derived from relevance-theoretic principles a tool of interpretation applicable for practice-oriented studies of verbal communication. This tool is a criterion of correctness of given interpretations of texts (communicated as messages). As the tool is consist of a general method of measuring the relevance of a text to an individual, it enables decision in cases of doubt whether a given interpretation of a certain text is, indeed, the text’s correct interpretation. In light of this theoretical result enables clear definition of the extra-linguistic knowledge necessary for reconstructing the speaker’s meaning recently she applies Construction Grammar methods to identify the linguistic knowledge necessary for resolution of syntactic and semantic ambiguities and consider the theoretical possibility of automatic translation.