This book differs from other introductions to pragmatics in approaching the problems of interpreting language use in terms of interpersonal modelling of beliefs and intentions. It is intended to make issues involved in language understanding, such as speech, text, and discourse, accessible to the widest group possible -- not just specialists in linguistics or communication theorists -- but all scholars and researchers whose enterprises depend on having a useful model of how communicative agents understand utterances and expect their own utterances to be understood.
Based on feedback from...

This book differs from other introductions to pragmatics in approaching the problems of interpreting language use in terms of interpersonal modelling of beliefs and intentions. It is intended to make issues involved in language understanding, such as speech, text, and discourse, accessible to the widest group possible -- not just specialists in linguistics or communication theorists -- but all scholars and researchers whose enterprises depend on having a useful model of how communicative agents understand utterances and expect their own utterances to be understood.
Based on feedback from...

This book explores a variety of central issues in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), a major theory of syntactic representation that is becoming increasingly dominant, particularly in the domain of natural language computation. According to this theory, certain structurally key words ("heads") in any human language determine both the syntactic form and the semantic interpretaton of the sentences they appear in. The separate chapters consider problematic phenomena in German, Japanese and English and suggest important extensions of, and revisions to, the current...