Recently many theories of the semantics and pragmatics of deontic modals have relied on analogies with decision theory. One particularly straightforward way to make this connection is to build the semantics around degree scales, where the degrees in question involve expected (moral, personal, etc.) value. This “Bayesian” semantics has a number of attractive features involving information-sensit...

Testing pragmatic competence has always posed daunting challenges to researchers and practitioners. As a step to address the gap in pragmatic testing, this paper delineates the procedural stages of developing and validating a context-sensitive Multiple Choice Discourse Completion Test (MDCT). Following a unitary view of validity, tenable argument and empirical evidence was accumulated to suppor...

Pragmatics is the study of utterance meaning, and it is well known that prosody or, more informally, ' tone of voice' can contribute crucially to that meaning. Pragmatic effects in speech are thus the product of both what is said and how it is said, and the two are inextricably linked. However, while many working in pragmatics are well aware of the important contribution of prosody, exactly how...