although studies on pragmatics in general and politeness in particular abound in the literature, impoliteness has been largely ignored. in the present study, participants filled out either the persian or english version of a discourse completion test (dct). the researchers analyzed collected answers to discover the relationship between impoliteness and power. furthermore, the researchers compar...

This special issue of Fundamenta Informaticae is dedicated to papers related to the two workshops on “Logic for Pragmatics” held at the Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Verona, Italy, on September 1-5, 2003, and at LACL, Université de Paris 12, Créteil, France, on July 23-24, 2004. The following note outlines the main ideas of the “Logic for Pragmatics” discussed at those workshops an...

Recapitulation of Lecture 1 Aim of semantics and pragmatics: to give us a theory of linguistic meaning. Semantics: literal non-situation specific meaning of words + the meaning of the way words are combined = the starting point from which the whole meaning of utterance is constructed. Pragmatics: the meaning the speaker intends to communicate in a particular utterance. One of the questions sema...

Constraint-based approaches to pragmatics have customarily focused on the hearer, and offered accounts of the optimal interpretation of utterances. Blutner (2006, i.a.) has argued that it is necessary also to consider the role of the speaker, and thus motivates a bidirectional Optimality Theory (OT) approach to pragmatics. However, as he notes, this may have limited explanatory potential from a...

An account of utterance interpretation in discourse needs to face the issue of how the discourse context controls the space of interacting preferences. Assuming a discourse processing architecture that distinguishes the grammar and pragmatics subsystems in terms of monotonic and nonmonotonic inferences, I will discuss how independently motivated default preferences interact in the interpretatio...

1. Context, Semantics, and Pragmatics The linguistic subfields of semantics and pragmatics are both concerned with the study of meaning. We might say that semantics studies what Grice (1967) called the TIMELESS MEANING of a linguistic expression φ —the basic meanings of the words in φ composed as a function of the syntactic structure of φ. Formal semantics, especially since the seminal work of ...

This paper discusses the proper taxonomy of the semantics-pragmatics divide. Debates about taxonomy are not always pointless. In interesting cases taxonomic proposals involve theoretical assumptions about the studied field, which might be judged correct or incorrect. Here I want to contrast an approach to the semantics-pragmatics dichotomy, motivated by a broadly Gricean perspective I take to b...