This chapter focuses on the amount of pragmatics practice needed for promoting accurate and speedy recognition and production of requestmaking forms in L2 Chinese. Over four consecutive days, an input group (n=17) and an output group (n=17) practiced using target request-making forms via computerized input-based and output-based practice activities, respectively. Meanwhile, a control group (n=1...

Non-canonical constructions differ from canonical structures in that they carry extra pragmatic meaning relating their arguments to the current discourse. One important question is how language users learn the pragmatic relationships that govern these variations. This paper proposes that these relationships can be learned through analogical generalization over first explicit and then inferentia...

We describe a formal framework for interpretation of words and compounds in a discourse context which integrates a symbolic lexicon/grammar, word-sense probabilities, and a pragmatic component. The approach is motivated by the need to handle productive word use. In this paper, we concentrate on compound nominals. We discuss the inadequacies of approaches which consider compound interpretation a...

This paper proposes the use of dependent types for pragmatic phenomena such as pronoun binding and presupposition resolution as a typetheoretic alternative to formalisms such as Discourse Representation Theory and Dynamic Semantics.

We describe a formal framework for interpretation of words and compounds in a discourse context which integrates a symbolic lexicon/grammar, word-sense probabilities , and a pragmatic component. The approach is motivated by the need to handle productive word use. In this paper, we concentrate on compound nominals. We discuss the inadequacies of approaches which consider compound interpretation ...