Refusals are complex face-threatening speech acts whose appropriate performance requires not only lengthy sequences of negotiation and cooperative achievements, but also face-saving strategies to accommodate the disruptive nature act (Gass & Houck 1999). Also, since they have a face threatening nature, subject cultural variations. Consequently, care must be taken in choice refusal strategie...

This paper provides an outline of the changes in linguistics that gave rise to historical pragmatics in the 1990s and that have shaped its development over the twenty years of its existence. These changes have affected virtually all aspects of linguistic analyses: the nature of the data, the research questions, the methods and tools that are being used for the analysis, as well as the nature of...

Part I Pioneering Approaches 2 Changing Ideas about Reference 25 Herbert H. Clark and Adrian Bangerter 3 Psycholinguistic Experiments and Linguistic-Pragmatics 50 Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. 4 On the Automaticity of Pragmatic Processes: a Modular Proposal 72 Sam Glucksberg 5 Reasoning, Judgement and Pragmatics 94 Guy Politzer 6 Exploring Quantifiers: Pragmatics Meets the Psychology of Comprehension 1...

Pragmatics is everywhere in life, and now pragmatics has formed a trend of combining with other disciplines. As newly developed discipline, brings new perspective to the development English language literature. This thesis mainly studies definition, branches future trends pragmatics, which can provide some reference for interdisciplinary research.

Formal Pragmatics discusses various topics that are at the borderline of the semantics and pragmatics of natural language, in particular the treatment of indefinites and anaphora, presuppositions, and the analysis of focus. Enormous progress has been made in the last two decades in the analysis of these phenomena. It is time for this body of work to be summarized and described in a relatively e...

This paper aims to show how clinical pragmatics (the study of pragmatic deficits) can fruitfully inform the classical theoretical models proposed by philosophical pragmatics. In the first part of the paper I argue that theories proposed in the domain of philosophical pragmatics, as those elaborated by Austin and Grice, are not plausible from a cognitive point of view and that for this reason th...

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 ...

This paper explores the use of a simple and computational optimality theoretic pragmatics (OT pragmatics, OTP) to the analysis of the rhetorical structure of texts. It introduces this variant of OTP briefly and then shows that it can be applied to explain coherence, rhetorical relations, discourse trees and context dependence using the occasional extra premiss. It thereby improves on existing a...

Developers of current agent communication languages (ACLs) have exploited the parallels between agent communication and human communication in developing the syntax and semantics of their languages. In this paper we extend the comparison of agent communication language to natural language by proposing an ACL pragmatics. Just as in natural language, the pragmatics of an ACL is the relationship b...