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...

This paper investigates the mutual intelligibility of Chinese, Dutch (both foreign-language learners) and American (native language) speakers of English using SUS (Semantically Unpredictable Sentences) and SPIN (Speech in Noise) materials. We test the hypothesis that speakers and listeners who share the same native-language background have an advantage (interlanguage speech intelligibility bene...

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 paper conducts acoustic experiments from a signal processing perspective, to examine the “-/a/ /C_” syllable narrow focus processing strategy of English L2 learners. The research discusses F0, OQ and SQ as key phonatory acoustic parameters. L2 strategies are examined by measuring deviations from L1 group to L2 group. The matrix distance reflects L1’s traces in the interlanguage system.