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...

We present an eye-tracking experiment investigating the time course with which listeners derive pragmatic inferences from contextual information. We used as a test case the construction “It looks like an X” pronounced either with (a) a nuclear pitch accent on the final noun, or (b) a contrastive L+H* pitch accent and a rising boundary tone, a contour that can support a complex contrastive infer...

The work presented in this paper proposes to identify contrast in the form of contrastive word pairs and prosodically signal it with emphatic accents in a Text-to-Speech (TTS) application using a Hidden-Markov-Model (HMM) based speech synthesis system. We first describe a novel method to automatically detect contrastive word pairs using textual features only and report its performance on a corp...

this study explored the effect of contrastive phrase resynthesis instruction ongaining the teachability hypothesis stages in self-paced versus time-constrained oralproduction and recognition. three groups (i.e., 23 learners) of high beginner femalelearners in an english language institute were randomly selected from a cohort oflearners. one group received contrastive metalinguistic instruction ...