Pragmatic theories and computational models of reference must account for people's frequent use redundant color adjectives (e.g., referring to a single triangle as the blue triangle). The standard pragmatic view holds that informativity referential expression depends on contrast: Color should be used contrast competitors same kind preempt an ambiguity between several triangles different colors)...

The vocal expression of humans includes expressions of emotions, such as anger or happiness, and pragmatic intonations, such as interrogative or affirmative, embedded within the language. These two types of prosody are differently affected by the so-called push and pull effects. Push effects, influenced by psychophysiological activities, strongly affect emotional prosody, whereas pull effects, ...

The reductionist/holist debate seems an impoverished one, with many participants appearing to adopt a position first and constructing rationalisations second. Here I propose an intermediate position of pragmatic holism, that irrespective of whether all natural systems are theoretically reducible, for many systems it is completely impractical to attempt such a reduction, also that regardless if ...

A century ago, Peirce developed a pragmatic theory of meaning. The theory appeals to the Pragmatic Maxim. It says that the meaning of a concept is the sum total of its implications for possible observations and actions. The Relevance Theory of Sperber & Wilson is classified according to that criteria to the category of pragmatic theories of meaning. It is argued that relevance is an instance of...

This paper investigates semantic and pragmatic presupposition in Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) and enhances the pragmatic perspective of presupposition in DRT. In doing so, it draws attention to the need to account for agent presupposition (i.e. both speaker and hearer presupposition) when dealing with pragmatic presupposition. Furthermore, this paper links this pragmatic conception of ...

Testing pragmatic competence has always posed daunting challenges to researchers and practitioners. As a step to address the gap in pragmatic testing, this paper delineates the procedural stages of developing and validating a context-sensitive Multiple Choice Discourse Completion Test (MDCT). Following a unitary view of validity, tenable argument and empirical evidence was accumulated to suppor...