Semantic Interpretation of Pragmatic Clues: Connectives, Modal Verbs, and Indirect Speech Acts

摘要

Much work in current research in the field of semantic -pragmatic analysis has been concerned with the interpretation of natural language utterances in the context of dialogs. In this paper, however, we will present methods for a primary pragmatic analysis of single utterances. Our investigations involve problems which are not currently well understood, for example how to infer the speaker's intentions by using interpretation of connectives and modal verbs.This work is part of the joint project WISBER which is supported by the German Federal Ministery for Research and Technology. The partners in the project are: Nixdorf Computer AG, SCS GmbH, Siemens AG, the University of Hamburg and the University of Saarbruecken.