Pragmatic Reasoning, Defaults and Discourse Structure
Nicholas M. Asher, M. D. Williams · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2006
In this chapter we investigate the rational basis of pragmatic reasoning. For specificity, we’ll use a particular theory of discourse interpretation that combines an account of rhetorical structure with dynamic semantics. In particular we argue for a rich, linguistic notion of discourse context which we compute by means of simple defeasible rules in a nonmonotonic propositional logic. These defaults are linguistic in nature but have access to nonlinguistic domains of world knowledge that are encoded in a more complex nonmonotonic logic. Our approach takes as basic the idea that compositional and lexical semantics produce an underspecified logical form and that there’s a level of linguistic pragmatic reasoning that resolves underspecifications where possible, thus producing a more complete logical form for interpretation. We argue here that this assumption is reasonable from the standpoint of a general theory of rationality and we investigate particular justifications for the various pragmatic principles that the theory adopts, using a variety of game theoretic techniques. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.