One of the key challenges that organizations face when trying to integrate knowledge across different functions is the need to overcome knowledge boundaries between team members. In cross-functional teams these boundaries, associated with different knowledge backgrounds of people from various disciplines, create communication problems, necessitating team members to engage in complex cognitive p...

Polysemous adjectives seem to make irregular contributions to the meaning of adjective-noun phrases. This thesis provides a systematic explanation of this problem. Polysemous adjectives are considered semantically underspecified. The underspecified semantic meaning has to be pragmatically enriched with due consideration of world-knowledge and linguistic context. The treatment follows Blutner’s ...

Among the epistemological obstacles described by Gaston Bachelard, we contend that unitary and pragmatic knowledge is correlated to the teleological categories of Ernst Mayr and is the basis for prevailing debate on the notion of "function" in biology. Given the proximity of the aspects highlighted by these authors, we propose to associate the role of teleological thinking in biology and the no...

The vision of the Semantic Web is to reduce manual discovery and usage of Web resources (documents and services) and to allow intelligent agents to automatically identify these Web resources, integrate them and execute them for achieving the intended goals of the user. The composed Web service is represented as a workflow, called service flow. This paper presents different types of compositiona...

A philosophical basis for constructing knowledge-bases is established and the terms “knowledge”, “information” and “facts” defined in relation to it. It is then proposed how knowledge should be represented in knowledge-bases, and the need explained for a common language for machine to knowledge-base interaction, and machine-tomachine interaction about knowledge. An approach to the development o...

We will argue that this construction combines semantic and syntactic quirks that necessitate a constructional analysis. Further, we will show that specifying the pragmatic properties of the construction (and in particular the presuppositions that introduces) allows for a particularly elegant account of the construction’s distribution. This, in turn, provides further support for the sign-based v...

Pragmatic competence includes illocutionary competence, and sociolinguistic competence. Illocutionary competence indicates a speaker's ability to combine grammatical interpretation of an utterance with its speech act, and the sociolinguistic competence indicates a speaker's ability to perform language functions in appropriate ways according to context. One must gain pragmatic knowledge before b...