How To Derive Conveyed Meanings
Michael Morreau · 1995
I look at the role in utterance interpretation of one important part of the context of interpretation: the interpreter's knowledge of norms of language use and assumptions he can reasonably make about the intentional states of the utterer. I will focus on pragmatics of interpretation; in particular, on the contribution of context to the interpretation of conversational implicatures and presuppositions. This knowledge will be formalized in possible-worlds theory, lending some support to the notion that contexts of interpretation are simply sets of possible worlds. The derivation of conveyed meanings from utterances and the contexts in which they are uttered will be formalized using a form of nonmonotonic reasoning which amounts to a trivial part of Reiter's [1980] Default Logic.