Grammatical Pragmatics

The Grammatical View of Scalar Implicatures and the Relationship between Semantics and Pragmatics

Review of Formal Pragmatics . Semantics , Pragmatics ,

Formal Pragmatics discusses various topics that are at the borderline of the semantics and pragmatics of natural language, in particular the treatment of indefinites and anaphora, presuppositions, and the analysis of focus. Enormous progress has been made in the last two decades in the analysis of these phenomena. It is time for this body of work to be summarized and described in a relatively e...

Why Philosophical Pragmatics Needs Clinical Pragmatics

This paper aims to show how clinical pragmatics (the study of pragmatic deficits) can fruitfully inform the classical theoretical models proposed by philosophical pragmatics. In the first part of the paper I argue that theories proposed in the domain of philosophical pragmatics, as those elaborated by Austin and Grice, are not plausible from a cognitive point of view and that for this reason th...

Optimality-Theoretic Pragmatics Meets Experimental Pragmatics

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...

Local Pragmatics

The outline of a unified theory of local pragmatics phenomena is presented, including an approach to the problems of reference resolution, metonymy, and interpreting nominal compounds, and the TACITUS system embodying this theory is described. The theory and system are based on the use of a theorem prover to draw the appropriate inferences from a large knowledge base of commonsense and technica...