Topic: PRAGMATICS
Integrated pragmatic values
By Christopher Potts
I adapt recent results by Merin, Blutner, Jaeger, Krifka, van Rooy, and others to obtain integrated pragmatic values for utterances, thereby moving towards a precise definition of pragmatic felicity. I model speakers' perspectives with probability distributions over the set of possible worlds. The *quality-rating* of an utterance is an exponent of the speaker's probability value for its propositional content. An utterance's *quantity-rating* is the informativity of its content relative to the addressee's probabilities. I ensure that quality-ratings act as a check on quantity-ratings by taking the product of the two. I employ the notion of *relevance to a question* to further articulate these pragmatic values and arrive at a notion of *maximally felicitous utterance* (in context).
Keywords: pragmatics, probability, decision-theory, discourse particles, quality, quantity, relevance, litotes, pragmatic halos
Source: Semantics Archive
Posted by Tony Marmo
at 10:17 BST
