Despite the ’apparent clarity’ of a given legal provision, its application may result in an outcome that does not exactly conform to the semantic level of a statute. The vagueness within a legal text is induced intentionally to accommodate all possible scenarios under which such norms should be applied, thus making the role of pragmatics an important aspect also in the representation of a legal...

This article surveys the major kinds of empirical evidence used by linguists, with a particular focus on the relevance of the evidence to the goals of generative grammar. After a background section overviewing the objectives and assumptions of that framework, three broad kinds of data are considered in the three subsequent sections: corpus data, judgment data, and (other) experimental data. The...

Many developmental psycholinguists assume that young children have adult syntactic competence, this assumption being operationalized in the use of adult-like grammars to describe young children's language. This "continuity assumption" has never had strong empirical support, but recently a number of new findings have emerged - both from systematic analyses of children's spontaneous speech and fr...

This chapter presents the semantics and pragmatics of prosodic focus in alternative semantics. Half a dozen examples are given of empirical phenomena that are to be covered by the theory. Then a syntax marking the locus, scope, and antecedent for focus is introduced. The syntax is interpreted semantically and pragmatically by a presupposition involving alternatives. The alternative sets that ar...

In recent years, the methods of formal semantics and pragmatics have been fruitfully applied to analysis primate communication systems. Most analyses therein appeal a division labor between which has following three features: (F1) calls are given referential meanings (they provide information about world rather than just an action be taken), (F2) some general meaning, (F3) in context enriched b...

Prosody and Speaker State: Paralinguistics, Pragmatics, and Proficiency

The theme of this Special Issue is asymmetries in language acquisition, and the contributions present evidence for either the presence or the absence of a production/comprehension asymmetry in child language. The authors focus on various areas of linguistics, ranging from phonology and syntax to semantics and pragmatics, using a variety of empirical methods. Although the contributions do not ag...

Several approaches have recently been proposed for learning decentralized deep multiagent policies that coordinate via a differentiable communication channel. While these policies are effective for many tasks, interpretation of their induced communication strategies has remained a challenge. Here we propose to interpret agents’ messages by translating them. Unlike in typical machine translation...

This paper is about the cognitive foundations of pragmatic theories. Besides the fact that the usual appropriateness conditions for speech acts, which are given in cognitive terms, such as S knows/believes/wants ... (that) p , require empirical investigation, a sound theory of pragmatics must also explain how certain utterances in certain contexts are actually understood as certain speech acts....