Pragmatic competence is as an essential aspect of communicative competence. Does environment have an effect on developing pragmatic competence? Do levels of pragmatic competence differ between English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) students? Most studies have shown greater pragmatic awareness among ESL students than EFL students, indicating that the target la...

Abstract Language employs various coordinators to connect propositions, a subset of which are “logical” in nature and thus analogous the truth operators formal logic. We here focus on two linguistic connectives their negations: conjunction (inclusive) disjunction or . Linguistic exhibit truth-conditional component as part meaning (their semantics), but use context can give rise implicatures pre...

It is generally accepted that a discourse connective expresses a semantic and/or pragmatic relation between its matrix sentence or clause and something in the previous discourse. Usually the sense of this relation is expressed as a label, often within a hierarchy of sense labels. But the meaning of these labels may vary from system to system, and the same connective may be assigned different la...

Action semantics is a semantic description framework with very good pragmatic properties but a rather weak theory for reasoning about programs. A strong action theory would be of great practical use, however. It would make it possible to reason about the large class of programming languages that can be described in action semantics. This paper develops the foundations for a richer action theory...

Definiteness expresses a constellation of semantic, pragmatic, and discourse properties—the communicative functions—of an NP. We present a supervised classifier for English NPs that uses lexical, morphological, and syntactic features to predict an NP’s communicative function in terms of a language-universal classification scheme. Our classifiers establish strong baselines for future work in thi...

Although previous research has established that multiple top-down factors guide the identification of words during speech processing, the ultimate range of information sources that listeners integrate from different levels of linguistic structure is still unknown. In a set of experiments, we investigate whether comprehenders can integrate information from the 2 most disparate domains: pragmatic...

In this paper we investigate temporal patterns of web search queries. We carry out several evaluations to analyze the properties of temporal profiles of queries, revealing promising semantic and pragmatic relationships between words. We focus on two applications: query suggestion and query categorization. The former shows a potential for time-series similarity measures to identify specific sema...

In this extended abstract we discuss four related characteristics of semantic spaces as the standard model of meaning representation in quantitative semantics. We argue that these characteristics are challenged from the point of view of social web communities and the possibilities which they offer in terms of exploring semantic and pragmatic data. More specifically, we plead for a reconstructio...

During sentence processing, whether pragmatic information is integrated immediately and automatically or at a delay is a subject of debate in experimental pragmatics. One test case is that of scalar implicatures, which occur in statements like "some of the students are hardworking", which have both a logical meaning ("at least one is hardworking") and a pragmatic meaning ("not all of them are h...

SOMWeb is an online collaboration system based on Semantic Web technologies, which is used for knowledge sharing and dissemination within an oral medicine community in Sweden. Based on a previous study of the use of SOMWeb, general patterns of interaction and communicative activities involved in community collaboration have been identified. The patterns for one such activity, distance consultat...