In open and heterogeneous environments offered by the Internet, where agents are designed by different vendors, the development of standards for agent communication needs to keep abreast of new dynamic interaction modalities. The objective of this paper is to contribute to FIPA’s standardization effort by proposing a pragmatic approach to the design of agent communication languages (ACLs) in wh...

The ability to communicate is one of the most important properties of agents. In an open environment, like the Internet, in which agents are designed in many different ways, it is important to clearly establish the meaning of a standard language for artificial agents. Traditionally, the pragmatics of ACLs take the form of interaction protocols, which only specify the order in which messages occ...

Lexical Pragmatics is a research field that tries to give a systematic and explanatory account of a number of pragmatic phenomena that are connected with the semantic underspecification of lexical items. The approach combines a constraint-based semantics with a Gricean mechanism of pragmatics. The basic pragmatic mechanism rests on conditions of updating the common ground and allows to give a p...

Pragmatics is an area that may be underrepresented in ESL/EFL teaching. This study aims to investigate what extent pragmatics taught international EFL setting. For this purpose, 28 class sessions by 17 teachers from seven different cultural backgrounds were observed for their inclusion of pragmatic features classes. The results indicate, despite teaching school setting, these did not make impor...

Most people working on linguistic meaning or communication assume that semantics and pragmatics are distinct domains, yet there is still little consensus on how the distinction is to be drawn. The position defended in this paper is that the semantics/pragmatics distinction holds between (context-invariant) encoded linguistic meaning and speaker meaning. Two other ‘minimalist’ positions on seman...

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...

Prosody and Speaker State: Paralinguistics, Pragmatics, and Proficiency