The concept of indirectness (using of tools) in automatic problem solving is investigated, and a formal approach is suggested within the framework of the Situation Calculus. The "Robot and Box" problem serves as an illustrative example throughout the paper.

In Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, the degree of indirectness of an utterance is presumed to be commensurate with the sum of the variables of Distance, Power and Ranking of an imposition. This claim was tested with reference to a corpus of spontaneous requests from Cypriot Greek. It emerged that, rather than motivating the choice of a ‘generic’ politeness strategy corresponding to a cer...

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This article examines the results of a contrastive empirical study conventional indirect requests in Peninsular and Uruguayan Spanish. The reveal pragmatic similarities at level linguistic encoding utterances with both, Spanish speakers showing negative correlation between (in)directness social distance. less familiar interlocutors are each other, more likely it is for their to be realised indi...

The offer of some cake can be declined by saying “I am on a diet” – an indirect reply. Here, we asked whether certain well-established psychological and conceptual features are linked to the (in)directness speech acts issue unexplored so far. Subjects rated direct performed same critical linguistic forms in different dialogic contexts. We find that replies were understood with less certainty, p...

3 Omission, action, and related issues 4 3.1 Determinants of omission bias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 3.1.1 Perceived causality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 3.1.2 Physical proximity, contact, and personal force . . . . . . 6 3.1.3 Protected values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3.2 Related biases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...