The study of systems of communication may be divided into three parts: syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Accounts of the embedding of text-based languages in the computational processes of reasoners and communicators are relatively well developed; with accounts available for a spectrum of languages which ranges from the highly formalised and constrained, such as formal logics, to the highly informal and unconstrained natural languages used in everyday conversations. Analogies between diagrams and such textual representations of information are quite revealing about both similarities and differences and can provide a useful starting point for exploring the issues in a theory of diagrammatic communication. This paper sketches out a theory of diagrammatic communication, based upon recent studies of the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic component issues which such a theory must accommodate. In the context of this theory an exploration is made of the issues involved in answering...

The thesis specifies requirements for robust, cooperative and coherent dialogue systems and advocates a new approach, Constructive Dialogue Management. A prototype of a system capable of dealing with the planning of system reponses in factual information seeking dialogues is presented. Constructive Dialogue Management is based

This paper considers the implications for philosophy of some recent approaches to pragmatics (with a focus on relevance theory) and makes two main points. First, the widening gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning increasingly brings into question a basic assumption of much philosophy of language: that linguistic semantics provides direct insight into the structure of human thoughts. Second, by describing comprehension as a richly context-dependent form of inference, pragmatics provides an illustration of how we might approach central cognitive processes, which have been seen by Fodor as a major mystery for cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind. 1

One of the design considerations for HPSG is the integration of pragmatic information with grammatical and semantic information. This paper describes how the current framework might be adapted to reflect a general theory of pragmatics, and at the same time, enable more accurate accounts of pragmatic constraints on linguistic forms within HPSG. After fixing the denotations for some necessary terminology, I describe and elaborate some proposals that are incompletely sketched in the initial expositions of HPSG (Pollard and Sag 1987, 1994). I then demonstrate how two familiar pragmatic constraints on the use of lexical items (so-called extended reference, and Japanese empathy-sensitive verbs) can be represented more completely and more accurately. The paper concludes with a discussion of what is required to represent pragmatic conditions associated with particular syntactic constructions. 1 Some background This paper is about constraints on the felicitous utterance of signs. A sign is an...

This paper discusses the processes by which conversants in a dialogue can infer whether their assertions and proposals have been accepted or rejected by their conversational partners. It expands on previous work by showing that logical consistency is a necessary indicator of acceptance, but that it is not sufficient, and that logical inconsistency is sufficient as an indicator of rejection, but it is not necessary. I show how conversants can use information structure and prosody as well as logical reasoning in distinguishing between acceptances and logically consistent rejections, and relate this work to previous work on implicature and default reasoning by introducing three new classes of rejection: IMPLIGATURE REJECTIONS, EPISTEMIC REJECTIONS and DELIBERATION REJECTIONS. I show how these rejections are inferred as a result of default inferences, which, by other analyses, would have been blocked by the context. In order to account for these facts, I propose a model of the common ground that allows these default inferences to go through, and show how the model, originally proposed to account for the various forms of acceptance, can also model all types of rejection.

The term ‘conventional implicature ’ was introduced by Grice (1967/1975), though the notion had been foreshadowed as early as Grice (1961). In the central passages, he says (1967/1989:24-26): I wish to introduce, as terms of art, the verb implicate and the related nouns implicature (cf. implying) and implicatum (cf. what is implied). … In some cases the conventional meaning of the words used will determine what is implicated, besides helping to determine what is said. If I say (smugly), He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave, I have certainly committed myself, by virtue of the meaning of my words, to its being the case that his being brave is a consequence of (follows from) his being an Englishman. But while I have said that he is an Englishman, and said that he is brave, I do not want to say that I have said (in the favored sense) that it follows from his being an Englishman that he is brave, though I have certainly indicated, and so implicated, that this is so. I do not want to say that my utterance of this sentence would be, strictly speaking, false should the consequence in question fail to hold. So some implicatures are conventional... The only other English expression that Grice identified as triggering a conventional implicature was but. The term has been used in various ways by different authors. For example, Karttunen & Peters (1979) used it to describe conventionally triggered presuppositions. Bach (1999) argued that Grice was wrong about but and therefore, calling into question the existence of conventional implicatures as a class. But Chris Potts puts quite a different complexion on the matter in the

The connective or can be treated as an inclusive disjunction or else as an exclusive disjunction. Although researchers are aware of this distinction, few have examined the conditions under which each interpretation should be anticipated. Based on linguistic-pragmatic analyses, we assume that interpretations are initially inclusive before either (a) remaining so, or (b) becoming exclusive by way of an implicature (but not both). We point to a class of situations that ought to predispose disjunctions to inclusive interpretations and to situations that encourage exclusive interpretations. A disjunction’s ultimate interpretation is based on its potential informativeness, where the interpretation of the disjunctive utterance having the smallest number of true conditions is considered most informative. Our investigation leads to five experiments employing arbitrary materials. Among the problems expected to encourage inclusive interpretations are those that present disjunctions in the antecedents of conditionals and in question forms. The best candidates to produce implicatures are those disjunctions that underdetermine an expected conjunctive conclusion, although other disjunctive utterances that are more informative as exclusive are discussed and tested.

this paper is that the nature of the pragmatic information available from the use of linguistic signs does not parallel the more specifically linguistic information carried by signs. For one thing, even including the indexical information (i.e., indices for speaker, hearer, time and location of the act of uttering something that the sign represents), pragmatic information is not so much information about the sign as it is about the relation between the user of the sign and the act of using the sign. First and foremost, pragmatic information is information about mental models: speaker's and addressee's mental models of each other. for George to understand Martha's utterance of "X" to George, George must not only recognize (speech perception, parsing) that she has said "X," he must have beliefs about Martha which allow him to infer what her purpose was in uttering "X," and that in turn entails that he has beliefs about her model of him, including his model of her, etc.

In the 1980’s, the analysis of presupposition projection contributed to a ‘dynamic turn’ in semantics: the classical notion of meanings as truth conditions was replaced with a dynamic notion of meanings as Context Change Potentials (Heim 1983). We explore an alternative in which presupposition projection follows from the combination of a fully classical semantics with two pragmatic principles of manner, Be Articulate and Be Brief. Be Articulate is a violable constraint which requires that a meaning pp’, conceptualized as involving a precondition p (its ‘presupposition’), should be articulated as … (p and pp’) … (e.g. … it is raining and John knows it…) rather than as … pp ’. Be Brief, which is more highly ranked than Be Articulate, disallows a full conjunction whose first element is semantically idle. In particular,... (p and pp’)... is ruled out by Be Brief- and hence … pp ’ … is acceptable despite Be Articulate- if one can determine as soon as p and is uttered that no matter how the sentence ends these words could be eliminated without affecting its contextual meaning. Two equivalence theorems guarantee that these principles derive Heim’s results in almost all cases. Unlike dynamic semantics, our analysis does not encode in the meaning of connectives the left-right asymmetry which is often found in presupposition projection; instead, we give a flexible analysis of this incremental bias, which allows us to account for some ‘symmetric readings ’ in which the bias is overridden (e.g. If the bathroom is not hidden,

this paper. References