The pragmatics component of SPEECHLIS is a process which applies various facts about the speaker, the previous dialogue, and the domain of discourse to interpret utterances and respond appropr iately. For example, an early version of the system operates as a question answerer for the domain of lunar geology. In that domain one is usually not concerned with the particular scientists who investig...

According to standard pragmatics, we should account for conversational implicatures in terms of Grice’s (1967) maxims of conversation. Neo-Griceans like Atlas & Levinson (1981) and Horn (1984) seek to reduce those maxims to the so-called Q and I-principles. In this paper I want to argue that (i) there are major problems for reducing Gricean pragmatics to these two principles, and (ii) in fact, ...

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Variation in prosody, or intonation, can influence the interpretation of linguistic phenomena in many languages (Ladd 1980, 1996; Bolinger 1986, 1989). Type and location of prosodic prominence and prosodic phrase boundaries, different overall intonational contours, and changes in intensity, duration, and speaking rate can, in appropriate contexts, help to indicate syntactic attachment, disambig...

TEXAN is a sysLem of bransfer, .or iented t ex t ana lys is . I ts l i n g u i s t i c concept is based on a communicative appY'oacll w i th in the framework of speech act theory. In th is view tex ts are considered to be the resu l t of l i n g u i s t i c act ions° I t is assumed tha t they contro l the se lect ion of t r a n s l a t i o n equ iva lents . The t ransi t i o n of th i s concept...

This contribution investigates the interactions between the (mental) lexicon and pragmatics. It aims to give an overview about pragmatic phenomena that are connected with the semantic underspecification of lexical items. Cases in point are the pragmatics of adjectives, effects of negative strengthening, systematic polysemy, the distribution of lexical and productive causatives, blocking phenome...

We survey three domains – scalar implicatures, presupposition, and conventional implicatures – in which the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics has given rise to new empirical and formal insights in the last decade. In each case, there is a vibrant contemporary debate concerning the modular decomposition of rich arrays of data.