Pragmatics: Some Topic Areas and Questions

Deixis
- How do listeners/readers interpret words, such as you, which refer to different things depending on the speaking context?
Anaphora resolution
- How do listeners/readers interpret NPs (or missing NPs in languages which permit this) which are (almost) content-free?
Discourse processing
- How do speakers/writers structure discourses of particular types (instructions, narratives, arguments)?
- How do listeners/writers discover the structure of discourses?
- How do rhetorical relations tie pieces of a discourse together?
Story understanding
- How does a listener/reader assign a frame or combination of frames to an input story in order to make sense out of it?
Speech acts and text planning
- How does a speaker/writer plan to achieve a high-level goal using language?
- How does a listener/reader infer the goal behind a sentence or discourse?
Affect, formality, politeness
- How does a speaker/writer satisfy affective goals?
- How do languages constrain speakers/writers to make choices related to politeness?

Last modified: Tue Nov 18 22:32:53 EST
Comments: gasser@cs.indiana.edu