These days there’s a computational version of everything. Computational biology, computational musicology, computational archaeology, etc, etc. Even movies are going digital. This chapter, as you might have guessed by now, thus explores the computational side of pragmatics. Computational pragmatics might be defined as the computational study of the relation between utterances and context. Like ...

This paper explores the use of a simple and computational optimality theoretic pragmatics (OT pragmatics, OTP) to the analysis of the rhetorical structure of texts. It introduces this variant of OTP briefly and then shows that it can be applied to explain coherence, rhetorical relations, discourse trees and context dependence using the occasional extra premiss. It thereby improves on existing a...

Developers of current agent communication languages (ACLs) have exploited the parallels between agent communication and human communication in developing the syntax and semantics of their languages. In this paper we extend the comparison of agent communication language to natural language by proposing an ACL pragmatics. Just as in natural language, the pragmatics of an ACL is the relationship b...

This work follows mainly the ideas as well as the structure of Leech and Weisser’s article “Pragmatics and Dialogue”, Chapter 7 in “The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics” [Leech and Weisser, 2003]. First of all we will clarify what pragmatics is all about and on which philosophical and linguistic concepts it is founded. In particular we will consider speech acts and other concepts th...

Unlike other areas of second language study, which are primarily concerned with acquisitional patterns of interlanguage knowledge over time, most studies in interlanguage pragmatics have focused on second language use rather than second language learning. The aim of this paper is to profile interlanguage pragmatics as an area of inquiry in second language acquisition research, by reviewing exis...

The main concern of this article is to discuss some recent findings concerning the psychological reality of optimality-theoretic pragmatics and its central part – bidirectional optimization. A present challenge is to close the gap between experimental pragmatics and neo-Gricean theories of pragmatics. I claim that OT pragmatics helps to overcome this gap, in particular in connection with the di...