1. INTRODUCTION Relevance theory (RT) is best known for its account of verbal communication and comprehension, but it also sets out a general picture of the principles driving the human cognitive system as a whole and this plays a crucial role in underpinning the particular claims made about communication and the pragmatic theory that follows from them. The various post-Gricean accounts of the ...

The term "pragmatics" is often used to refer without distinction, on one hand, to the contextual selection of interpretation norms and, on the other hand, to the context-sensitive processes guided by these norms. Pragmatics in the first acception depends on language-independent contextual factors that can, but need not, involve Theory of Mind; in the second acception, pragmatics is a language-s...

This book makes the case that the relatively new field of pragmatics has an inherently multidisciplinary nature, with strong relationships with other fields of study including, among others, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence and language pathology. Cummings argues convincingly that the study of pragmatics should be influenced by, and has much to off...

We propose a program of research which has as its goal establishing a framework and methodology for investigating the pragmatic aspects of the translation process and implementing a computational platform for carrying out systematic experiments on the pragmatics of translation. The program has four components. First, on the basis of a comparative study of multiple translations of the same docum...

Current semantic theory on indexical expressions claims that demonstratively used indexicals such as this lack a referent-determining meaning but instead rely on an accompanying demonstration act like a pointing gesture. While this view allows to set up a sound logic of demonstratives, the direct-referential role assigned to pointing gestures has never been scrutinized thoroughly in semantics o...

In this paper, we explore the interaction between lexical semantics and pragmatics. Linguistic processing is informationally encapsulated and utilises relatively simple ‘taxonomic’ lexical semantic knowledge. On this basis, defeasible lexical generalisations deliver defeasible parts of logical form. In contrast, pragmatics is open-ended and involves arbitrary knowledge. Two axioms specify when ...

This study investigated the impact of individual differences like language proficiency, gender and age on the Iranian EFL learners interlanguage pragmatics in institutional discourse especially, their capacity to recognize and to rate pragmatic and grammatical infelicities in speech act situations of request and apology.  To this end, one hundred and eighty-seven EFL university students at thre...