The model of definite description interpretation in [Poesio, 1993] is revised to avoid the previous theory’s assumption that the interpretation of definites occurs after scope interpretation has taken place. The processes involved in the interpretation of a definite are formalized as DRS construction rules applying in parallel to generate alternative hypotheses out of underspecified representat...

Modelling the semantics of the German causal preposition durch (’by’, ’by means of’, ’through’) poses a challenge to formal-semantic analyses applying mechanisms of strict compositionality. To deal with this challenge, a formalism which is based on recent important developments in Discourse Representation Theory is developed, including a more elaborate analysis of presuppositional phenomena as ...

alternative assessment approaches received considerable attention soon after a discontent with traditional, one-shot testing. these approaches, however, have been used only to improve learners’ linguistic ability despite communicative models of language which pointed that knowledge of language also involves pragmatic ability (bachman, 1990; bachman & palmer, 1996). the present study tries t...

Our study examines interpersonal functions enacted through a stance marker in spoken ELF academic discourse. We specifically focus on investigating the of I don’t know an speech event by embracing pragmatics and sociolinguistics perspective to figure out how it contributes act stancetaking as intersubjective activity. have examined 14 interactions doctoral defense discussions from ELFA corpus. ...

The objective of the Unisys Spoken Language Systems effort is to develop and demonstrate technology for the understanding of goal-directed spontaneous speech input. The Unisys spoken language architecfure couples a speech recognition system (the MIT Summit system) with the Unisys discourse understanding system Pundit. Pundit is a broad-coverage language understanding system used in a variety of...

although studies on pragmatics in general and politeness in particular abound in the literature, impoliteness has been largely ignored. in the present study, participants filled out either the persian or english version of a discourse completion test (dct). the researchers analyzed collected answers to discover the relationship between impoliteness and power. furthermore, the researchers compar...

In the volume under review, papers by eleven authors are included which were presented at the international conferenceConnectives asDiscourse Landmarks (University of Paris-Diderot, May 2005). emain point of interest of present studies are syntactic, semantic and pragmatic functions of several discourse connectives in English. e term ‘connective’ is being used in a broad sense, without specif...