Journal ArticleDOI
Indirect Speech Acts
Nicholas Asher,Alex Lascarides +1 more
TLDR
It is shown how a formal semantictheory of discourse interpretation can be used to define speech acts and to avoid murky issues concerning the metaphysics of action.Abstract:
In this paper, we address several puzzles concerning speech acts,particularly indirect speech acts. We show how a formal semantictheory of discourse interpretation can be used to define speech actsand to avoid murky issues concerning the metaphysics of action. Weprovide a formally precise definition of indirect speech acts, includingthe subclass of so-called conventionalized indirect speech acts. Thisanalysis draws heavily on parallels between phenomena at the speechact level and the lexical level. First, we argue that, just as co-predicationshows that some words can behave linguistically as if they're `simultaneously'of incompatible semantic types, certain speech acts behave this way too.Secondly, as Horn and Bayer (1984) and others have suggested, both thelexicon and speech acts are subject to a principle of blocking or ``preemptionby synonymy'': Conventionalized indirect speech acts can block their`paraphrases' from being interpreted as indirect speech acts, even ifthis interpretation is calculable from Gricean-style principles. Weprovide a formal model of this blocking, and compare it withexisting accounts of lexical blocking.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
End-of-Dinner Food Offering: A Three-Way Contrastive Study
Rong Chen,Chunmei Hu +1 more
TL;DR: This paper conducted a three-way contrastive study of the structure of the end-of-dinner food offering event across three population groups: Chinese residents of the City of Xi'an as of 1995 (as reported in Chen, 1996), American residents of Southern California as of 2019, and Chinese residents in China as of 2018.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
Dialogue Act Modeling for Non-Visual Web Access
TL;DR: A dialogue act model towards developing a speech enabled browsing system is presented based on the corpus data that was collected in a wizard-of-oz study with 24 blind individuals who were assigned a gamut of browsing tasks.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
Advanced question and answering systems for community development
TL;DR: It is proposed that one of the ways to alleviate the burden of knowledge transfer among practitioners is to build a large repository of community development practices and practitioner knowledge using video or automated slide shows and an intelligent agent question/answering system to simulate a conversation.
Journal ArticleDOI
Analyzing the speech act of disagreement produced by iraqi efl learners: a gender study
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated whether gender affects the production of disagreement strategies (dependent variables) used by Iraqi EFL learners using a descriptive quantitative approach using a written discourse completion task (WDCT) as a tool for collecting data.
References
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Book
How to do things with words
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors presented a series of lectures with the following topics: Lecture I * Lecture II* Lecture III * Lectures IV* Lectures V * LectURE VI * LectURES VI * LII * LIII * LIV * LVI * LIX
Book ChapterDOI
Logic and Conversation
TL;DR: For instance, Grice was interested in Quine's logical approach to language, although he differed from Quine over certain specific specific questions, such as the viability of the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements.
Book
Head-driven phrase structure grammar
Ivan A. Sag,Carl Jesse Pollard +1 more
TL;DR: This book presents the most complete exposition of the theory of head-driven phrase structure grammar, introduced in the authors' "Information-Based Syntax and Semantics," and demonstrates the applicability of the HPSG approach to a wide range of empirical problems.