The literature investigating the notion of presupposition in Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) has mainly been dubbed as being semantic (Simons 2003). This paper investigates the linguistic application of pragmatic-based constraints to the ‘semantic’ notion of presupposition in DRT. By applying pragmatic-based constraints to presuppositional phenomenon, we aim to defend DRT against the accu...

The complexity of the dilemmas we face on an organizational, societal and global scale forces us into sensemaking activity. We need tools for expressing and contesting perspectives flexible enough for real time use in meetings, structured enough to help manage longer term memory, and powerful enough to filter the complexity of extended deliberation and debate on an organizational or global scal...

The term discourse theory encompasses a diverse set of insights, assumptions, and concepts that have emerged across a range of disciplines in recent decades. Discourse theory generally derives from the “ linguistic turn ” in the humanities and social sciences that traces back to the work of infl uential fi gures such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Michel Foucault (Rorty, 199...

I this article we argue that discourse structure constrains the set of possible constituents in a discourse that can provide the relevant context for structuring information in a target sentence, while information structure critically constrains discourse structure ambiguity. For the speaker, the discourse structure provides a set of possible contexts for continuation while information structur...

this study examines the efficiency of pedagogical intervention in raising l2 pragmatic awareness of the iranian efl learners. more specifically, it seeks to investigate the difference between explicit and implicit instructions in improving pragmatic appropriateness of the english refusals by adult persian native speakers in an efl classroom context. fifty-four participants, with approximately t...

The paper aims to give a comprehensive account of translation strategies for English-Ukrainian interpretation Joseph R. Biden’s speech in Poland. Political speeches serve as multi-purpose tool, shaping people’s consciousness and reinforcing political practices firmly held beliefs. Therefore, the appropriate methods are needed retain such communicative effect on recipient audience. discourse int...

We contrast two views of how contextual influence on sentence meaning composition can be explained. The Semantic Similarity View maintains that discourse context affects sentence meaning mainly because of the semantic similarity between the words in the discourse context and the words in the sentence (as measured by Latent Semantic Analysis). The Free Pragmatic View, in contrast, defends the cl...

The German words nicht and etwa can be used in two very different ways. Under one use, nicht semantically resembles the clausal negation marker not in English, while the word etwa is close in meaning to the adverb approximately. In this use, nicht and etwa affect the truth-conditions of the sentence, just as their English equivalents. But nicht and etwa can also be truth-conditionally inert wit...

We propose a framework to model human comprehension of discourse connectives. Following the Bayesian pragmatic paradigm, we advocate that discourse connectives are interpreted based on a simulation of the production process by the speaker, who, in turn, considers the ease of interpretation for the listener when choosing connectives. Evaluation against the sense annotation of the Penn Discourse ...