The article aims to give an overview about the application of Optimality Theory (OT) to the domain of pragmatics. In the introductory part we discuss different ways to view the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics. Rejecting the doctrine of literal meaning we conform to (i) semantic underdetermination and (ii) contextualism (the idea that the mechanism of pragmatic interpretation ...

Philosophers coming to language from the tradition of logical semantics have sometimes been inclined to discount this sort of phenomenon. It makes no difference to the truth conditions of this particular sentence, and may appear merely to be an aspect of the vocal realization of the sentence—of interest to phonologists, and perhaps to socio-linguists, but not of much importance to fundamental p...

The notion of UNDERSPECIFICATION [17, 2, 21, 25] has been proposed as a possible solution to the problem of specifying a theory of the semantics / pragmatics interface—more specifically, of the process of identifying an interpretation in context—that is consistent with psychological, as well as linguistic evidence. The assumptions about the respective roles of semantics and pragmatics adopted i...

BACKGROUND One of the most important ingredients of felicitous conversation exchanges is the adequate expression of illocutionary force and the achievement of perlocutionary effects, which can be considered essential to the functioning of pragmatic competence. FINDINGS The breakdown of illocutionary and perlocutionary functions is one of the most prominent external features of cognitive impai...

ly specify a certain language L in order to characterize the speech habits of a community P by saying that they are using that language and conforming to conventions involving it. 6 The uses of linguistic forms on which their semantics depends, and which therefore constitute the pragmatic basis for their semantics, are their past uses: what an expression means at time t in a given community dep...

The process of agent communication modeling has not yet received much attention in the knowledge systems area. Conventional knowledge systems are rather simple with respect to their communication structure: often it is a straightforward question-and-answer sequence between system and end user. However, this is different in recent intelligent multi-agent systems. Therefore, agent communication a...

The paper presents a novel existential account of the additive particle too. The analysis is based on a combination of compositional DPLstyle dynamic semantics and pragmatic reasoning. The existential presupposition is formalised in a dynamic semantics for too, while pragmatic principles control for correct resolution of the parallel reference made. The main empirical challenge addressed in the...

In this paper, we explore the interaction between lexical semantics and pragmatics. We argue that linguistic processing is informationally encapsulated and utilises relatively simple ‘taxonomic’ lexical semantic knowledge. On this basis, defeasible lexical generalisations deliver defeasible parts of logical form. In contrast, pragmatic inference is openended and involves arbitrary real-world kn...

The realization of Semantic Web reasoning is central to substantiating the Semantic Web vision. However, current mainstream research on this topic faces serious challenges, which force us to question established lines of research and to rethink the underlying approaches. 1 What is Semantic Web Reasoning? The ability to combine data, mediated by metadata, in order to derive knowledge which is on...

This paper argues against the complete elimination of logical introduction rules from the pragmatic inference system. To maintain the consistency of the inference system as a whole, which is meant to support one’s truth-based judgment over propositions, the inference system should have access to both introduction and elimination rules. I show that the inclusion of introduction rules in the prag...