Modern pragmatics has been defined as “philosophical” pragmatics, not only because its main representative authors, such as John Austin (1962) and Paul Grice (1989), were philosophers of ordinary language, but also because it has used linguistic and philosophical analysis as the key method to give an explanation of the communicative features of language. If we consider language in general as an...

This paper describes the design and rationale behind a classification scheme for English margin comments. The scheme’s design was informed by pragmatics and pedagogy theory, and by observations made from a corpus of 24,387 margin comments from assessed university assignments. The purpose of the scheme is to computationally explore content and form relationships between margin comments and the p...

In this contribution we focus on one phenomenon that has a special role in pragmatic theorizing, namely metaphor, and select two issues deriving from theoretical models and prone to be tested experimentally. The first issue concerns the comprehension procedure, that is whether access to metaphorical meaning goes through a mandatory literal stage and thus is indirect, as predicted by a Gricean i...

This article surveys the state of the art in the field of semantic universals. We examine potential semantic universals in three areas: (i) the lexicon, (ii) semantic “glue” (functional morphemes and composition principles), and (iii) pragmatics. At the level of the lexicon, we find remarkably few convincing semantic universals. At the level of functional morphemes and composition principles, w...

This paper is an inquiry into the empirical grounding of actability—an important concept for the understanding of information systems pragmatics. The paper describes the structure and the application of an analytic framework based on actability and the semiotic framework. Actability has been proposed as an important concept for the understanding of information systems pragmatics and the semioti...

This article surveys the state of the art in the field of semantic universals. We examine potential semantic universals in three areas: (i) the lexicon, (ii) semantic “glue” (functional morphemes and composition principles), and (iii) pragmatics. At the level of the lexicon, we find remarkably few convincing semantic universals. At the level of functional morphemes and composition principles, w...

What knowledge sources are necessary in the interpretation and generation of ellipsis? After a short background on earlier approaches we compare and discuss each of the four papers selected for this special issue, examining how they approach ellipsis generation or interpretation. We highlight areas where more research needs to be done: outlining how pragmatics affects ellipsis, empirical studie...

The Semantic Web requires the ability to express information in a precise-interpretable form so that software sharing data can also gain an understanding of the meaning of the terms describing the data. Referred to as the third component of the Semantic Web, ontologies are the means by which separate web components can share a common language and communicate in order to work together efficientl...

This paper proposes a new model of communication in multiagent systems according to which the semantics of communication depends on their pragmatics. Since these pragmatics are seen to result from the consequences of communicative actions as these have been empirically observed by a particular agent in the past, the model is radically empirical, consequentialist and constructivist. A formal fra...

This paper concerns the semantics/pragmatics interface for natural language, and in particular the question of how anaphora resolution should be orchestrated in a dynamic semantics. Previous dynamic systems such as DPL have relied on preindexation of anaphors and antecedents. It is argued that this represents a serious inadequacy. A dynamic semantic system, RPL, is proposed which eliminates the...