Suppose you witnessed the killing of Harry by Frank and wish to report on that. To express this unfortunate event, you may consider using a sentence such as Frank killed Harry, or A man killed Harry, or He killed Harry, and perhaps even briefly consider the reverse word order Harry killed Frank. When choosing the form to be used, however, it is important that a hearer will understand the chosen...

A view of human-human interaction is presented and its implications for human-computer interaction discussed. Two propositions are advanced. The first is that interaction with computer systems is properly seen as mediated discourse, more akin to reading books and notices than interpersonal dialogues. The second proposition is a consequence of this, namely that unconstrained natural language is ...

A discourse planner for (task-oriented) dialogue must be able to make choices about whether relevant, but optional information (for example, the "satellites" in an RST-based planner) Should be communicated. We claim that effective text planners must explicitly model aspects of the Hearer's cognitive state, such as what the hearer is attending to and what inferences the hearer can draw, in ord@r...

In the past decades, there has been much progress in the formal Semantics of ordinary language. Logicians, linguists and philosophers have extensively used logical formalisms in order to interpret directly or after translation important fragments of actual natural languages. They have thereby contributed to the foundations of the theory of sentence meaning. In formal Semantics, speaker meaning ...

Definiteness effects have been attested in the literature for some DPs complementing HAVE (= English and their counterparts other languages). In this paper, which focuses on Spanish, demonstrative are shown to be affected by type-token distinction contexts: internal argument of receives a type reading these cases rejects to-ken interpretation. The “type restriction DPs” (TRD) is follow from nee...

This politeness study aimed to investigate the different strategies or face-saving acts of teachers as they engaged in casual conversations. utilized discourse analysis research method identifying face-savings exhibited from samples The researcher analysed linguistic corpora using Brown and Levinsons Politeness Theory. Data showed that interactants observed use positive such as: By intensifying...

The aim of this paper is to get rid of a nasty ambiguity between commands and permissions associated with imperatives (necessity/constraining of options vs. possibility/widening of options). I argue that a uniform semantics in terms of necessity together with certain assumptions about the context can account for the different effects on the pragmatic side. The difference is explained by employi...

Taking so-called split utterances as our point of departure, we argue that a new perspective on the major challenge of disambiguation becomes available, given a framework in which both parsing and generation incrementally involve the same mechanisms for constructing trees reflecting interpretation (Dynamic Syntax: (Cann et al., 2005; Kempson et al., 2001)). With all dependencies, syntactic, sem...