Constraint-based approaches to pragmatics have customarily focused on the hearer, and offered accounts of the optimal interpretation of utterances. Blutner (2006, i.a.) has argued that it is necessary also to consider the role of the speaker, and thus motivates a bidirectional Optimality Theory (OT) approach to pragmatics. However, as he notes, this may have limited explanatory potential from a...

An account of utterance interpretation in discourse needs to face the issue of how the discourse context controls the space of interacting preferences. Assuming a discourse processing architecture that distinguishes the grammar and pragmatics subsystems in terms of monotonic and nonmonotonic inferences, I will discuss how independently motivated default preferences interact in the interpretatio...

1. Context, Semantics, and Pragmatics The linguistic subfields of semantics and pragmatics are both concerned with the study of meaning. We might say that semantics studies what Grice (1967) called the TIMELESS MEANING of a linguistic expression φ —the basic meanings of the words in φ composed as a function of the syntactic structure of φ. Formal semantics, especially since the seminal work of ...

This paper discusses the proper taxonomy of the semantics-pragmatics divide. Debates about taxonomy are not always pointless. In interesting cases taxonomic proposals involve theoretical assumptions about the studied field, which might be judged correct or incorrect. Here I want to contrast an approach to the semantics-pragmatics dichotomy, motivated by a broadly Gricean perspective I take to b...

The central problem for pragmatics is that sentence meaning vastly underdetermines speaker’s meaning. The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning is bridged. This paper defends the broadly Gricean view that pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in mind-reading, involving the inferential attribution of intentions. We argue, however...

the present study investigated learners’ interlanguage pragmatic development through analysis of 99 requestive emails addressed to a faculty member over a period of up to two years. most previous studies mainly investigated how non-native english speaking students’ (nness) pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence differed from native english speaking students (ness) and compared learners ...

Clinical pragmatics is a sub-discipline of clinical linguistics and deals with the various situations in which communication can malfunction or function insufficiently. It also focuses on reasons that may cause poor communication. The current research theoretical survey attempts to shed some light what its scope. This field covered general. More specifically, study answer following question: Wh...

background: pragmatics is appropriate use of language across a variety of social contexts  that  provides accurate interpretation   of   intentions.   the   occurrence    of   the right hemisphere lesions can interfere with pragmatic abilities, and particularly with the processing of nonliteral speech acts. methods: since the objective of this study was to assess different  aspects of pragmatic...

Abstract This paper investigates how pragmatics can be deployed to interpret non-standard usages in the context of English language users. There are two important linguistics keys interpreting meanings English: and grammatical competence. For effective communication, a decoder must competent at levels. Many researchers Nigeria have agreed that, Nigerian has come stay, therefore, we need look be...

Models and methods of rational choice theory naturally suggest themselves as excellent candidates for formal accounts of pragmatic inferences conceived in a Gricean fashion as the result of interpreting language use as rational human action. This paper spells out a particular way of using game theory in linguistic pragmatics and assesses weaknesses and strength of the suggested approach. The pa...