Grammar: relevance-theoretic concerns

The relationship between generative grammar and (relevance-theoretic) pragmatics

The generative grammar approach to language seeks a fully explicit account of the modular system of knowledge (competence) that underlies the human language capacity. Similarly, the relevance-theoretic approach to pragmatics attempts an explicit characterisation of the subpersonal systems involved in utterance interpretation. As an on-line performance system, however, it is subject to certain a...

Optimality-theoretic Lexical Functional Grammar

A relevance theoretic approach to relevance

This paper outlines a model of what a theory of mental representations (TMR) for reference resolution would be. Such a theory would be a specification of relevance theory on the specific point of referents attribution. Mental representations (MR) are conceived as a kind of hinge between referring expressions on the one hand and objects in the world on the other hand. The introduction defines re...

Template Construction Grammar: a Schema-Theoretic Computational Construction Grammar

Template Construction Grammar (TCG) was developed as part of an effort to build a system-level neuro-computational model simulating the dynamics at play during languagevision interactions. This paper presents TCG as a computational framework designed to model the human brain’s capacity to dynamically coordinate two concurrent incremental processes, one generating a message and the other organiz...

Relevance-theoretic pragmatics and modularity

An interesting issue for any mentalist approach to pragmatics is whether the utterance comprehension system is an autonomous processor within the overall cognitive system or consists of processes carried out by an unencapsulated central inferencing system. Two approaches to pragmatics which claim to involve modular subsystems in utterance understanding are discussed (Barton's contextual submodu...