In this paper, we address several puzzles concerning speech acts, particularly indirect speech acts. We show how a formal semantic theory of discourse interpretation can be used to define speech acts and to avoid murky issues concerning the metaphysics of action. We provide a formally precise definition of indirect speech acts, including the subclass of so-called conventionalized indirect speec...

One of the key requirements in understanding a text is deciding how successive utterances relate to one another. Anaphors help in this respect by picking out entities already existing in the discourse and indicating the referent to which the new information encoded in the utterance should be attached. Sometimes, the interpretation of an anaphor is determined entirely by the morphosyntactic feat...

This essay presents a reflective narrative on an innovative approach taken to create open,“free” space in which share ideas and discuss the theme “Spaces of Affectivity” across disciplines arts, humanities, geography with focus exploration negotiation socio-spatial cultural productions identity. These reflections are based planning two symposia held 2014 2015 under title Spaces Affectivity at L...

earlier linguistic studies of political discourse revealed that, not many works exist on pragmatic analysis of impoliteness in this genre. apart from mullany (2002), who employs relational and face works to analyses impoliteness in political discourse, taiwo (2007), adetunji (2009), and ademilokun (2015), who employ discourse analytical tools in analyzing the political speeches, there exist ver...

In this paper, we address several puzzles concerning speech acts, particularly indirect speech acts. We show how a formal semantic theory of discourse interpretation can be used to define speech acts and to avoid murky issues concerning the metaphysics of action. We provide a formally precise definition of indirect speech acts, including the subclass of so-called conventionalized indirect speec...

Comparing English and Finnish, and simplifying a complex issue very much, we can say that English has fixed word order and Finnish has free word order. Syntactic theories such as HPSG (Sag and Wasow, 1999) have provided relatively successful descriptions of English, using a phrase structure approach to capture generalizations about fixed word order. Software tools such as LKB (Copestake, 2000) ...

The conditions under which the band gaps of free standing and embedded semiconductor quantum dots are direct or indirect are discussed. Semiconductor quantum dots are classified into three categories; (i) free standing dots, (ii) dots embedded in a direct gap matrix, and (iii) dots embedded in an indirect gap matrix. For each category, qualitative predictions are first discussed, followed by th...

There is a long history of using logic to model the interpretation of indirect speech acts. Classical logical inference, however, is unable to deal with the combinations of disparate, conflicting, uncertain evidence that shape such speech acts in discourse. We propose to address this by combining logical inference with probabilistic methods. We focus on responses to polar questions with the fol...