The apparent contextual variability exhibited by ‘knows’ and its cognates – brought to attention in examples like Keith DeRose’s Bank Case – poses familiar problems for conservative forms of invariantism about ‘knows’. The paper examines and criticises a popular response to those problems, one that involves appeal to so-called ‘pragmatic’ features of language. It is first argued, contrary to wh...

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to infer dialogue acts using the notion of tacit contracts. We describe the interpersonal linguistic features that our analysis grammar can identify in uttered texts and present an inference procedure that strictly separates the semantic and pragmatic steps of utterance understanding, thereby meeting a higher degree of modularity, a prerequisite for ex...

We use machine learners trained on a combination of acoustic confidence and pragmatic plausibility features computed from dialogue context to predict the accuracy of incoming n-best recognition hypotheses to a spoken dialogue system. Our best results show a 25% weighted f-score improvement over a baseline system that implements a “grammar-switching” approach to context-sensitive speech recognit...

A patient in whom a severe systemic illness was characterised by weight loss, arthralgia and breathlessness was exposed to her pet bird. This pragmatic approach reproduced the features of her illness. The changes that occurred in her pulmonary physiology and histology differed from those seen in extrinsic allergic alveolitis in many important respects.

We examine the effect of contextual and acoustic cues in the disambiguation of three discourse-pragmatic functions of the word okay. Results of a perception study show that contextual cues are stronger predictors of discourse function than acoustic cues. However, acoustic features capturing the pitch excursion at the right edge of okay feature prominently in disambiguation, whether other contex...

The RT Role-based Trust-management framework provides policy language, semantics, deduction engine, and pragmatic features such as application domain specification documents that help distributed users maintain consistent use of policy terms. This paper provides a general overview of the framework, combining some aspects described in previous publications with recent improvements and explanatio...

This paper proposes a new methodology in investigating the semantic and pragmatic properties of SFPs in Mandarin Chinese. A case study of the interaction and correlation between SFP-Ne and SpOAs--Shenzhi, Qishi, and Nanguai has been conducted. Two semantic features of [+unexpectedness] and [+intersubjectivity] have been summarized on SFP-Ne.

This  paper  focuses  on  some  pragmatic  expressions  that  are  characteristic  of  informal  spoken English, their possible equivalents in some other languages, and their use by EFL learners from different  backgrounds.  These  expressions,  called  general  extenders  (e.g.  and  stuff,  or something), are shown to be different from discourse markers and to exhibit variation in form, funct...