Pragmatic Considerations in Man-Machine Discourse

levels and internal representations and often enough they get lost in their own symbolic maze and have to invent more and more artificial tricks to climb out of their constructions and still meet the surface of the utterance. Of course, it is hopeless "to seek meaning in the physical properties of utterances and formal properties of language. However, the simple :[act is, that speech is merely noise until its potential meaning is appeciated by the cognitive activity of a hearer" (Harris/Begg/Upfold (]6)) . There is a good example which shows that there are even cases in which you cannot decide whether you are talking about objects or words or abstract constructions. Sidner (24) introduced the notion of "~egni tlve cospecification" for the following example to show that some anaphors cannot be replaced by a literal antecedent in any previous sentence: "My neighbor has a monster Harley 1200 They are real ly huge but gas effJ cient bikes" Another good example for the non-uniqueness of vfsual perception: Conc]in and Mc])ona]d ( 7 ) tried to built their techniques of generating image descriptions on their observations what peop]e found worth describing in photographs. But what these ff nterviewee found salient was highly dependent of the context of the request for description. And this is a matter of pragmatics o "There is no salience in a vacuum" (7) . This discrepancy is ref] coted also in Butterworth's (5) 5. and 6. maxims for tile I]nguistic study of conversation which