This book takes a diachronic approach to a variety of forms commonly subsumed under the notion of COMMENT CLAUSE (CC). It explicitly excludes some of the most frequent, well-known and widely studied CCs, for example I think and I guess, which have been discussed elsewhere by the same author (Brinton 1996). At the same time, it includes some less widely studied examples, such as CCs with see, sa...

In this paper, we translate sentence generation from TAG grammars with semantic and pragmatic information into a planning problem by encoding the contribution of each word declaratively and explicitly. This allows us to tap into the recent performance improvements in off-the-shelf planners. It also opens up new perspectives on referring expression generation and the relationship between languag...

The present investigation sought to comparatively explore the effect of length of residence (LOR) as well as EFL instruction on the pragmatic competence of Iranian learners. The participants were 45 EFL learners in Iran and 45 learners in Canada selected based on snowball sampling and each group was divided into three sub-groups based on the years of learning English in an EFL or a natural sett...

Graph-based notations form a significant subclass of visual languages. Studies of the use of such notations in practice have shown that users often employ pragmatic aspects, such as layout, to capture important domain information. Moreover this pragmatic information can support and guide reasoning over such representations. However, typical formalisations of graph-based notations often pay scan...

This paper will describe a process of ‘pragmatic annotation’ (c.f. Simpson-Vlach and Leicher 2006) which systematically identifies pragmatic meaning in spoken text. The annotation of stretches of text that perform particular pragmatic functions allows conclusions to be drawn across data sets at a different level than that of the individual lexical item, or structural content. The annotation of ...

Phrase-final intonation was analysed in a subcorpus of Swedish computer-directed question utterances with the objective of investigating the extent to which final rises occur in spontaneous questions, and also to see if such rises might have pragmatic functions over and beyond the signalling of interrogative mode. Final rises occurred in 22 percent of the utterances. Final rises occurred mostly...

Various pragmatic accounts of the functions of alternative syntactic constructions are available, in terms of presuppositions, information structure, or speaker intentions. Following a consideration of some of the various restrictions applying to the use of the alternative syntactic forms, the paper reviews some of these pragmatic accounts. It then proposes a characterisation of speaker intenti...

An object modeling approach offers advantages in supporting Dimensional Data Modeling (DDM) of data warehouses and data marts. The current approach to making the basic decisions in producing a DDM is a pragmatic one. The pragmatic approach has had considerable commercial success [1], but it still makes tight coupling of strategic goals and objectives to the DDM result a matter of art, rather th...

Although feedback utterances are ubiquitous in dialogue and identified as a crucial aspect of language interaction, existing semantic/pragmatic proposals do not offer a comprehensive model for them. The present abstract argues for a two-step formal model using fairly standard semantics for lexical item entries and attempting to derive the pragmatic communicative functions from the semantics tha...

There exist eight conjunctions in Georgian used to express semantic or pragmatic contrast, which constitute an implicational hierarchy: aramed > oγond > tumca > magram > k'i//k'idev > xolo > tu > da. The given string is organized in such a way that the skill of conjunctions to express contrasting bindings is decreasing from the left to the right. On the basis of functional-semantic analysis of ...