Ethos, the speaker’s image in speech is one of three means persuasion e stablished by Aristotle’s Rhetoric and often studied a loose way. Many scholars develop lists self-images (ethos leader, modesty ethos, etc.), but few explain how arrives at these types ethos. This precisely what inferential approach described here intends to do. Considering, like many discourse analysts, that ethos consubs...

This paper reviews some cases in which the collaboration of theoretical pragmaticians and psychologists of language has been most fruitful for all parties. Linguists have benefited from experimental data confirming the psychological validity of their observations and providing theory-critical evidence in cases beyond the reach of reflective intuition, while psychologists have benefited from hav...

The ability to communicate is one of the crucial properties of agents. In this paper a normative approach to the pragmatics of Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) is proposed. 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...

If the life of everyday language can be captured by any single domain of linguistic research, surely pragmatics must be among the top candidates for that honor. Casting its wide net around phenomena as diverse as intonational, morphological and syntactic variation with implications for social and interpersonal meanings, speech acts and their diverse realizations, discourses coherence and cohesi...

The modular approach to language in its career of 30 years had alternating and rivaling views regarding the place pragmatics. A first basically is one outlined by Fodor (1983) that would pack pragmatic aspects use under rubric mushy General Problem Solver component architecture, thus extracting it from considerations modularity altogether. rival Massive Modular approaches such as Dan Sperber’s ...

The term "pragmatics" is often used to refer without distinction, on one hand, to the contextual selection of interpretation norms and, on the other hand, to the context-sensitive processes guided by these norms. Pragmatics in the first acception depends on language-independent contextual factors that can, but need not, involve Theory of Mind; in the second acception, pragmatics is a language-s...

This book makes the case that the relatively new field of pragmatics has an inherently multidisciplinary nature, with strong relationships with other fields of study including, among others, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence and language pathology. Cummings argues convincingly that the study of pragmatics should be influenced by, and has much to off...