In this paper we investigate the rational foundations of pragmatic reasoning. For specificity, we’ll use a particular theory of discourse interpretation that combines an account of rhetorical structure with dynamic semantics. In particular we argue for a rich, linguistic notion of discourse context which we compute by means of simple defeasible rules in a nonmonotonic propositional logic. These...

Special intonation and discourse particles can act as pragmatic roadsigns that signal specific moves in conversation. By making the nature of a conversational move explicit, these devices can aid in pragmatic processing. I make this idea precise using a Question under Discussion framework. Several case studies are presented.

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A pivotal issue in research on writing concerns whether the knowledge of how genres are constructed and learned in one discipline/genre can be transferred to other contexts, genres, and disciplines. Yet, studies conducted so far have not presented a unified and complete view of how various writing instructional techniques can result in transferability. This study examined the effect of structur...

This paper will describe a process of ‘pragmatic annotation’ (c.f. Simpson-Vlach and Leicher 2006) which systematically identifies pragmatic meaning in spoken text. The annotation of stretches of text that perform particular pragmatic functions allows conclusions to be drawn across data sets at a different level than that of the individual lexical item, or structural content. The annotation of ...

Givenness (Schwarzschild, 1999) is one of the central notions in the formal pragmatic literature discussing the organization of discourse. In this paper, we explore where distributional semantics can help address the gap between the linguistic insights into the formal pragmatic notion of Givenness and its implementation in computational

Discourse structure and coherence relations are one of the main inferential challenges addressed by computational pragmatics. The present study focuses on discourse markers as key elements in guiding the inferences of the statements in natural language. Through a rule-based approach for the automatic identification, classification and annotation of the discourse markers in a multilingual parall...