This paper discusses two possible formal approaches to the semantic/pragmatic characterisation of a subclass of the modal particles. It may well be that the approaches can be applied to other particles or that they can be applied to certain intonational patterns (e.g. contrastive stress), to morphemes (past tense, agreement) or to words (pronouns), constructions (some uses of definite descriptions, clefts), but I will not try to to show that here. The first approach is based on the optimality theoretic reconstruction of (...) Blutner & J¨ ager (2000) of the theory of presupposition that has become fairly standard, the Heim (1983) and van der Sandt (1992) view of presuppositions as anaphora (see Zeevat (1992) for an introduction and comparison). The first half of the paper critically reviews my earlier views on the treatment of particles in this setting, the second part introduces a novel view, again based on optimality theory, which takes as a starting point the marking constraints that are a necessary ingredient of my earlier treatment. (shrink)

Based on the tenets of the so-called ‘radical pragmatics’ school (see, for instance, Cole, 1981), this book takes a particular view with regard to the relationship between content and linguistically encoded meaning. The traditional view embodied in the work of Montague and Kaplan (e.g., Kaplan, 1979; Montague, 1970) sees content being fully determined by linguistic meaning relative to a contextual index. In contrast, the radical view takes it that, although linguistic meaning is clearly important to content, it does not determine (...) it, as pragmatic principles also play a role. The central issue of this book is how to give a principled account of the determination of content. Seeing linguistic meanings as underdetermining the content (proposition) expressed, there must be a pragmatic mechanism of completion which can be best represented as an optimization procedure. It is demonstrated that the general framework of Optimality Theory (OT) makes it possible to formulate the desired explanatory principles. The first section of this general introduction outlines the basic framework of OT as applied to phonology, syntax and morphology. The second section takes a historical perspective and shows that the idea of optimization was present in the pragmatic enterprise right from the beginning. Further, it explains the main advantages of the general framework of OT when applied to the field of pragmatics, and it puts the whole idea into concrete terms by demonstrating how Horn’s (1984) theory of conversational implicature can be implemented within a bidirectional optimality theory. In section 3, we rise several basic questions underlying the whole volume and discuss them from a theoretical and empirical perspective. This part 1 gives a overview of the different topics treated in the book, and it explains in which respects the single contributions aim to satisfy our cooperative goal: to give a new impulse to the tradition of radical pragmatics. Section 4, finally, outlines basic open question of future research.. (shrink)

Harmonic Alignment was proposed by Prince and Smolensky (1993) as a mechanism to establish a correspondence between different harmony scales within the overall framework of Optimality Theory (“OT” henceforth). They specifically address the combination of the phonological sonority hierarchy with the hierarchy of syllable positions. In recent work, Judith Aissen has taken up this idea as a mean to formulate insights from the functionally oriented markedness theory in morphology and syntax within OT syntax (cf. Aissen 1999, 2000). Though based on (...) earlier work in typology like Silverstein (1981) , Aissen manages a formalization of a mechanism that promises an account of much that seems quaint and bizarre about natural languages when considered from the perspective of e.g. a designer of computer languages or logical formalisms. Suppose a linguistic item can be classified according to two features, A and B. Suppose furthermore that A has two possible values, A1 and A2, while B has n possible values, B1 . . . Bn, for some n ≥ 2. Finally, the values of each both features are ranked according to their prominence. Lets say that A1 is more prominent than A2, and Bi is more prominent than Bj iff i < j. Formally, we thus have the prominence scales.. (shrink)

The contributions in this volume focus on the Bayesian interpretation of natural languages, which is widely used in areas of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and computational linguistics. This is the first volume to take up topics in Bayesian Natural Language Interpretation and make proposals based on information theory, probability theory, and related fields. The methodologies offered here extend to the target semantic and pragmatic analyses of computational natural language interpretation. Bayesian approaches to natural language semantics and pragmatics are based on (...) methods from signal processing and the causal Bayesian models pioneered by especially Pearl. In signal processing, the Bayesian method finds the most probable interpretation by finding the one that maximizes the product of the prior probability and the likelihood of the interpretation. It thus stresses the importance of a production model for interpretation as in Grice’s contributions to pragmatics or in interpretation by abduction. (shrink)

The paper explores the introduction of contracts in the common ground by means of requests, promises and questions. Various modal operators are introduced to achieve the modelling of these new additions to the conversational record. The paper extends the treatment of Zeevat 97 and introduces the beginnings of a theory of action.

The paper introduces a statistical notion of bidirectionality aimed at bridging the gap between synchronic and diachronic linguistic explanations.

Kaplan's theory of demonstratives and deicticals can be brie y stated as follows. Expressions of this kind depend for their interpretation on the context of utterance and in a context of utterance they refer directly to whatever they refer to. Direct reference in turn consists in two properties. The rst property is the absence of a Fregean sense. The context does its work once and for all and the reference is not in uenced by a counterfactual circumstance in which something (...) else is pointed at or somebody else is speaking. The second property is the rigidity of the reference: if the reference is direct, it is the same in all possible worlds. It is rigid in a sense slightly stronger than Kripke's, because even in worlds where the object does not exist, the reference is still to the object referred to in the context of utterance. Demonstratives or deicticals can fail to refer when the utterance is abnormal. Consider e.g. a demonstrative without an accompanying pointing gesture or one with a pointing gesture that fails to point to anything. For deicticals we need slightly more imagination: consider an inscription in the beach sand of I am the greatest or an utterance coming from outside of space-time of I am here now. In such cases we have a defective context of utterance. One class of counterexamples to this theory is important in the context of dialogue systems incorporating the facility of pointing in a graphical representation visible on the computer screen: demonstratives used to refer to objects represented in a picture. Kaplan discuError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapsses his pointing to a picture of Spiro T. (shrink)

A simple mathematical notion of a sign is a partial function f defined on semantic representations and mapping its parts to a set of morphs in a syntactic representation together with the domain and target representation. S =.

One way of describing the enterprise of natural language semantics is by analogy with interpreted formal languages, e.g. the language of arithmetic interpreted on the natural numbers. English is then the formal language consisting of the well-formed sentences of English interpreted on the structure we happen to nd around us. The business of the natural language semanticist is to describe the correlation of the formal expressions with that structure. This paper is directed against this particular interpretation 1 of the enterprise (...) of logical natural language semantics. (shrink)

also as a theory of interpretation, and extending it with a bidirectional pragmatic component that is closely related to existing ideas about natural language interpretation. The paper argues for the priority of the direction from content to form, develops the..