Pragmatic Languages with Universal Grammars

This paper shows the existence of an equilibrium pragmatic Language with a universal grammar as a coordination device under communication misunderstandings. Such a language plays a key role in achieving efficient outcomes in those Sender-Receiver games where there may exist noisy information transmission. The Language is pragmatic in the sense that the Receiver’ best response depends on the context, i.e, on the payoffs and on the initial probability distribution of the states of nature of the underlying game. The Language has a universal grammar because the coding rule does not depend on such specific parameters and can then be applied to any Sender-Receiver game with noisy communication.grammar, pragmatic language, prototypes, separating equilibria

Polysemy and word meaning: an account of lexical meaning for different kinds of content words

There is an ongoing debate about the meaning of lexical words, i.e., words that contribute with content to the meaning of sentences. This debate has coincided with a renewal in the study of polysemy, which has taken place in the psycholinguistics camp mainly. There is already a fruitful interbreeding between two lines of research: the theoretical study of lexical word meaning, on the one hand, and the models of polysemy psycholinguists present, on the other. In this paper I aim at deepening on this ongoing interbreeding, examine what is said about polysemy, particularly in the psycholinguistics literature, and then show how what we seem to know about the representation and storage of polysemous senses affects the models that we have about lexical word meaning

The Metaphysics of Words

What are words? How should words be individuated? Such questions set the agenda for the metaphysics of words. Unfortunately, misunderstandings are piling up in this eld. Although the discussion between Kaplan, Cappelen, Hawthorne, Lepore and others has given rise to interesting insights into many aspects of words, I contend that the debate is highly compromised by a lack of clarity about the questions in the rst place. The purpose of this paper is to partially clarify the debate on the metaphysics of words by examining the very nature of the questions to be addressed. I shall dierentiate three inquiries about words and shall provide explanations of why misunderstandings can and do arise. I claim that, in so doing, we may put the debate back on solid footing in order to rethink the real nature of words

Neurocognitive Informatics Manifesto.

Informatics studies all aspects of the structure of natural and artificial information systems. Theoretical and abstract approaches to information have made great advances, but human information processing is still unmatched in many areas, including information management, representation and understanding. Neurocognitive informatics is a new, emerging field that should help to improve the matching of artificial and natural systems, and inspire better computational algorithms to solve problems that are still beyond the reach of machines. In this position paper examples of neurocognitive inspirations and promising directions in this area are given

Self-Repair Devices in Classroom Monologue Discourse

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Value Disagreement and Two Aspects of Meaning

The problem of value disagreement and contextualist, relativist and metalinguistic attempts of solving it are laid out. Although the metalinguistic account seems to be on the right track, it is argued that it does not sufficiently explain why and how disagreements about the meaning of evaluative terms are based on and can be decided by appeal to existing social practices. As a remedy, it is argued that original suggestions from Putnam's 'The Meaning of "Meaning"' ought to be taken seriously. The resulting dual aspect theory of meaning can explain value disagreement in much the same way as it deals with disagreement about general terms. However, the account goes beyond Putnam's by not just defending a version of social externalism, but also defending the thesis that the truth conditional meaning of many evaluative terms is not fixed by experts either and instead constantly contested as part of a normal function of language

The role of salience in processing pragmatic units

The goal of the paper is twofold. Firstly, it explains the relevance of the Graded Salience Hypothesis (Giora 1997; 2003; Kecskés 2001) to pragmatics research, arguing that although this hypothesis is a psycholinguistic theory it may contribute significantly to our understanding of pragmatic processing. Secondly, it will be claimed and demonstrated through examples that the salient meaning of lexical units constituting utterances in conversation plays a more important role in comprehension than has been believed by the supporters of linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic theories that consider context to be the main source of actual contextual meaning