Negation is a fundamental element of language and logical systems, but processing negative sentences can be challenging. Early investigations suggested that this difficulty was due to the representational challenge of adding an additional logical element to a proposition, but in more recent work, supportive contexts mitigate the processing costs of negation, suggesting a pragmatic explanation. ...

Using research on the ageing mind, support is offered for the concept of bio-cultural sciences. The bio-cultural sciences highlight the notion that human behaviour is the joint and co-constructive expression of biological–genetic and cultural–societal processes and conditions. The genome determines the ontogeny of the brain; however, so does the cultural–social environment and individual behavi...

The approach to pragmatics explored in this article focuses on elements of social interaction which are of universal relevance, and which may provide bases for a comparative approach. The discussion is anchored by reference to a fragment of conversation from a video-recording of Lao speakers during a home visit in rural Laos. The following points are discussed. First, an understanding of the fu...

We introduce the principles behind the launch of a new journal in semantics and pragmatics and outline the journal’s processes and policies. S&P is a peer-reviewed open access journal. The main content is high quality, original, selfcontained research articles on the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages. While our target audience is primarily academic linguists, we expect to also publi...

This article is concerned with integrating the phenomenon of selectional restrictions in a formal grammar theory. Firstly, the question of treating selectional restrictions purely in the semantic module is discussed, as there are some contextual (or pragmatic) influences, which can repair the ill-formedness of violated selectional restrictions. Secondly, we shed light on the stucture of pragmat...

In open and heterogeneous environments offered by the Internet, where agents are designed by different vendors, the development of standards for agent communication needs to keep abreast of new dynamic interaction modalities. The objective of this paper is to contribute to FIPA’s standardization effort by proposing a pragmatic approach to the design of agent communication languages (ACLs) in wh...

The ability to communicate is one of the most important properties of agents. 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 of ACLs take the form of interaction protocols, which only specify the order in which messages occ...

Lexical Pragmatics is a research field that tries to give a systematic and explanatory account of a number of pragmatic phenomena that are connected with the semantic underspecification of lexical items. The approach combines a constraint-based semantics with a Gricean mechanism of pragmatics. The basic pragmatic mechanism rests on conditions of updating the common ground and allows to give a p...

Pragmatics is an area that may be underrepresented in ESL/EFL teaching. This study aims to investigate what extent pragmatics taught international EFL setting. For this purpose, 28 class sessions by 17 teachers from seven different cultural backgrounds were observed for their inclusion of pragmatic features classes. The results indicate, despite teaching school setting, these did not make impor...

Most people working on linguistic meaning or communication assume that semantics and pragmatics are distinct domains, yet there is still little consensus on how the distinction is to be drawn. The position defended in this paper is that the semantics/pragmatics distinction holds between (context-invariant) encoded linguistic meaning and speaker meaning. Two other ‘minimalist’ positions on seman...