Everyone agrees that conversations take place in a context. This is not to merely point out that conversations occur at a time and a place, or that there are particular speakers and hearers, though this is all of course true. Conversations take place against a background of mutually recognized facts: facts about the beliefs and presumptions of the participants, facts about the information conve...

These days there’s a computational version of everything. Computational biology, computational musicology, computational archaeology, etc, etc. Even movies are going digital. This chapter, as you might have guessed by now, thus explores the computational side of pragmatics. Computational pragmatics might be defined as the computational study of the relation between utterances and context. Like ...

We will focus in our paper on positions (1) and (3). A plausible candidate for a linguistic phenomenon that can be successfully modeled by a subset of game-theory is argumentation (cf. Ducrot (1980)). Argumentation concerns aspects of the meaning of sentences (words) that are not reducible to truth conditions. As such, one may ask whether these aspects are properly grammatical (i.e., encoded in...

A genuine comprehension of the process of human communication within organisations requires a detailed understanding of pragmatics. Accordingly, our aim here is to work towards a richer means of analysing and describing multimodal documents at the pragmatic level than is currently available within the framework of Organisational Semiotics. Our basic strategy is to take six of the most widely kn...

The findings from a number of recent studies indicate that, even in cases of successful bilingual first language acquisition, the possibility remains of a certain degree of crosslinguistic influence when the choice between syntactic options is affected by discourse pragmatics. In this study we focussed on the use of referring expressions, prime candidates to test the interaction between syntax ...