Within relevance theory the two local pragmatic processes of enrichment and loosening of linguistically encoded conceptual material have been given quite distinct treatments. Enrichments of various sorts, including those which involve a logical strengthening of a lexical concept, contribute to the proposition expressed by the utterance, hence to its truth-conditions. Loosenings, including metaphorical uses, do not enter into the proposition expressed by the utterance or affect its truth-conditions; they stand in a relation of 'interpretive resemblance ' with the linguistically encoded concept used to represent them. This asymmetric treatment is questioned here, arguments are given for an account which reflects the complementarity of these processes and several alternative symmetrical treatments are explored. 1

Followers of Wittgenstein allegedly once held that a meaningful claim to know that p could only be made if there was some doubt about the truth of p. The correct response to this thesis involved appealing to the distinction between the semantic content of a sentence and features attaching (merely) to its use. It is inappropriate to assert a knowledge-claim unless someone in the audience has doubt about what the speaker claims to know. But this fact has nothing to do with the semantic content of knowledgeascriptions; it is entirely explicable by appeal to pragmatic facts about felicitous assertion (that is, a kind of use of a sentence). According to the contextualist about knowledge, the (propositional) semantic content of knowledge-claims is sensitive to context. In a context in which skeptical possibilities are sufficiently salient, the word "know " expresses a relation that holds between persons and a highly restricted range of propositions. In a context in which skeptical possibilities are not salient, the word "know " expresses a different relation, one that a person can bear to a proposition even if she is in a fairly weak epistemic position with respect to it. In support of her position, the contextualist often points to the

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...

This paper explores an alternative account, which relies on the notion of graphical implicature. Whether or not the current account is useful has broader significance, because if it is useful, it helps supply the first premise for the following argument: (i) there are certain parallels between pragmatic phenomena in natural language (NL) and graphical representation; (ii) formal techniques have been developed for modelling some of the NL phenomena; and thus (iii) once the graphical data are better-understood, we may be able to treat them with formal techniques from NL pragmatics. The paper has the following structure. First, we introduce the phenomena discussed by Petre and Green, and summarise their account. Then we introduce some key concepts from linguistic pragmatics, focussing on Grice's [1975] theory of implicature. We then indicate how Grice's ideas have been applied in the graphical domain, by Marks and Reiter [1990]. Finally, we show how the ideas apply to Petre and Green's observations, and relate the two accounts. 2 Network diagrams

Most Natural Language Generation systems developed to date assume that a user will learn only what is explicitly stated in the discourse. This assumption leads to the generation of discourse that states explicitly all the information to be conveyed, and does not address further inferences from the discourse. In this paper, we describe a student model which provides a qualitative representation of a student's beliefs and inferences, and a content planning mechanism which consults this model in order to address the above problems. Our mechanism performs inferences in backward reasoning mode to generate discourse that conveys the intended information, and in forward reasoning mode to draw conclusions from the presented information. The forward inferences enable our mechanism to address possible incorrect inferences from the discourse, and to omit information that may be easily inferred from the discourse. In addition, our mechanism improves the conciseness of the generated discourse by om...

Since Austin introduced the term infelicity, the linguistic literature has been flooded with its use. Today, not only performatives that fail are considered infelicitous but also utterances that are syntactically, semantically, or pragmatically ill-formed. However, no formal or computational explanation has been given for infelicity. This thesis provides one for those infelicities that occur when a pragmatic inference is cancelled. We exploit a well-known difference between pragmatic and semantic information: since implicatures and presuppositions, i.e., the carriers of pragmatic information, are not specifically uttered, pragmatic inferences are defeasible, while most of semantic inferences are indefeasible. Our contribution assumes the existence of a finer grained taxonomy with respect to pragmatic inferences. It is shown that if one wants to account for the natural language expressiveness, she should distinguish between pragmatic inferences that are felicitous to defeat and pragmatic inferences that are infelicitously defeasible. Thus, it is shown that one should consider at least three types of information: indefeasible, felicitously defeasible, and infelicitously defeasible. The cancellation of the last of these determines the pragmatic infelicities.

Recent work in relevance-theoretic pragmatics develops the idea that understanding verbal utterances involves processes of ad hoc concept construction. The resulting concepts may be narrower or looser than the lexical concepts which provide the input to the process. Two of the many issues that arise are considered in this paper: (a) the applicability of the idea to the understanding of metaphor, and (b) the extent to which lexical forms are appropriately thought of as encoding concepts.

The concept of an image of a fuzzy set under a fuzzy relation has proved to be a very powerful tool in fuzzy set theoretical applications. In this paper, we explain how it can be used to model linguistic expressions. For the representation of expressions, such as "at least middle-aged", "brighter than average", we will use fuzzy ordering relations, while resemblance relations will be suitable to model linguistic terms, such as "more or less expensive" and "very tall." We will show how these representations can be smoothly ntegrated in approximate reasoning schemes using the compositional rule of inference.

Abstract not found

Default reasoning occurs whenever the truth of the evidence available to the reasoner does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion being drawn. Despite this, one is entitled to draw the conclusion “by default” on the grounds that we have no information which would make us doubt that the inference should be drawn. It is the type of conclusion we draw in the ordinary world and ordinary situations in which we find ourselves. Formally speaking, ‘nonmonotonic reasoning’ refers to argumentation in which one uses certain information to reach a conclusion, but where it is possible that adding some further information to those very same premises could make one want to retract the original conclusion. It is easily seen that the informal notion of default reasoning manifests a type of nonmonotonic reasoning. Generally speaking, default statements are said to be true about the class of objects they describe, despite the acknowledged existence of “exceptional instances” of the class. In the absence of explicit information that an object is one of the exceptions we are enjoined to apply the default statement to the object. But further information may later tell us that the object is in fact one of the exceptions. So this is one of the points where nonmonotonicity resides in default reasoning.