Communication and Attitude Revision
Abstract
Much recent research has been directed toward understanding those aspects of language use that fall into that somewhat ill-defined area between semantics and pragmatics. The linguistic phenomena that seem to fall into this area include presupposition, implicature, speech acts (especially performatives) , metonymy, and metaphor. These linguistic phenomena can be characterized by a failure of truth conditional semantics alone to provide a satisfactory account, which is manifested in an obvious discrepancy between the 'superficial' or 'literal' content of the sentence and the intention underlying the speaker's use of the utterance in a particular situation. Several theories have been evolving that are directed toward explaining these phenomena on the border between semantics and pragmatics, which could be characterized broadly as update theories. All of these general frameworks have a common thread: a view of an utterance as an action that transforms an initial state of the world into a resulting state, and in the process producing a set of changes to the mental states of the participants. Theses changes are represented as an update to a model of their respective mental states. The meaning of the utterances in the most general sense is identified with the changes they produce in this model, rather than with their truth-conditional semantics alone.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1992
- Accession Number
- ADA259713
Entities
People
- Douglas E. Appelt
Organizations
- SRI International