Power in communication: implications for the semantics-pragmatics interface

The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface

We survey three domains – scalar implicatures, presupposition, and conventional implicatures – in which the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics has given rise to new empirical and formal insights in the last decade. In each case, there is a vibrant contemporary debate concerning the modular decomposition of rich arrays of data.

Procedural Meaning and the Semantics/ Pragmatics Interface

Underspecification and the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface

The notion of UNDERSPECIFICATION [17, 2, 21, 25] has been proposed as a possible solution to the problem of specifying a theory of the semantics / pragmatics interface—more specifically, of the process of identifying an interpretation in context—that is consistent with psychological, as well as linguistic evidence. The assumptions about the respective roles of semantics and pragmatics adopted i...

Semantics and Pragmatics for Agent Communication

For the successful management of interactions in open multiagent systems, a social framework is needed to complement a standard semantics and interaction protocols for agent communication. In this paper a rights-based framework in which interaction protocols and conversation policies acquire their meaning is presented. Rights improve interaction and facilitate social action in multi-agent domai...

Linguistic communication and the semantics/pragmatics distinction

Most people working on linguistic meaning or communication assume that semantics and pragmatics are distinct domains, yet there is still little consensus on how the distinction is to be drawn. The position defended in this paper is that the semantics/pragmatics distinction holds between (context-invariant) encoded linguistic meaning and speaker meaning. Two other ‘minimalist’ positions on seman...