Contexts of social action: guest editors' introduction

Cataloged from PDF version of article.In traditional linguistic accounts of context, one thinks of the immediate features of a speech situation, that is, a situation in which an expression is uttered. Thus, features such as time, location, speaker, hearer and preceding discourse are all parts of context. But context is a wider and more transcendental notion than what these accounts imply. For one thing, context is a relational concept relating social actions and their surroundings, relating social actions, relating individual actors and their surroundings, and relating the set of individual actors and their social actions to their surroundings

The complexity of context: Guest editors' introduction

Cataloged from PDF version of article.As with other widely used notions that are commonly referred to in everyday activities without much hesitation, context is difficult to analyze scientifically and grasp in all its different demeanors. In our routine communicative activities, context is exploited both in production and in comprehension, and is strictly related to another problematic notion, viz. meaning. Thus Bateson (1979: 15): ‘‘Without context, words and actions have no meaning at all. This is true not only of human communication in words but also of all communication whatsoever, of all mental process, of all mind, including that which tells the sea anemone how to grow and the amoeba what he should do next.’’..

When silence may mean derision

[No abstract available

On Strawsonian contexts

P.F. Strawson proposed in the early seventies a threefold distinction regarding how context bears on the meaning of 'what is said' when a sentence is uttered. The proposal was somewhat tentative and, being aware of this aspect, Strawson himself raised various questions to make it more adequate. In this paper, we review Strawson's scheme, note his concerns, and add some of our own. We also defend its essence and recommend it as an insightful entry point re the interplay of intended meaning and context. © John Benjamins Publishing Company

Sweeping with all graphical ingredients in a topological picturebook

Sweeping is a powerful method to generate 3-D shapes in geometric modeling. In this paper we formulate a general matrix to give a mathematical definition of twisted-profiled sweep objects as a discrete approximation. While conceptually simple, our result is, to our best knowledge, the first precise formulation of sweeping with all graphical ingredients, viz. twisting, scaling, rotation, and translation. Twisted-profiled sweeping surfaces defined by contour, profile, trajectory, and guide curves are thus represented in concatenated matrix formulation. In addition, we give interactive methods to generate sweep objects and present sample figures produced within the framework of our implementation Tb, a topological picturebook. © 1992

Situated nonmonotonic temporal reasoning with BABY-SIT

After a review of situation theory and previous attempts at 'computational' situation theory, we present a new programming environment, BABY-SIT, which is based on situation theory. We then demonstrate how problems requiring formal temporal reasoning can be solved in this framework. Specifically, the Yale Shooting Problem, which is commonly regarded as a canonical problem for nonmonotonic temporal reasoning, is implemented in BABY-SIT using Yoav Shoham's causal theories

The complexity of context: Guest editors' introduction

[No abstract available