Pragmatic overloading in Natural Language instructions
Barbara Di Eugenio, Bonnie Webber · 1996
It has long been noted that Natural Language utterances can communicate more than their conventional meaning (Grice, 1975). It has also been noted that behaving appropriately in response to instructions given in Natural Language requires understanding more than their conventional meaning (Suppes and Crangle, 1988; Webber and Di Eugenio, 1990; Webber et al., 1992). This paper addresses one mechanism by which speakers convey, and hearers derive, such additional aspects of meaning -- a mechanism we call pragmatic overloading. In pragmatic overloading, a clause interpreted as conveying directly or indirectly the goal fi of an action ff which is described by some other clause, forms the basis of constrained inference that leads to additional information about the action ff. The paper demonstrates pragmatic overloading through a variety of clausal adjuncts. We then discuss a framework that supports many of the inferences that pragmatic overloading gives rise to. This framework integrates a ...