A2: Interpretability in Context

The work of project A2 in the third phase will inform research on speech acts. It will bring to light under-investigated speech acts occurring in non-assertive linguistic situations. In addition to an interpretive analysis of these speech acts, it will contribute to our understanding of the semantics/pragmatics interface in general. The fictional nature of the texts we are investigating is contrasted with non-fictional utterance types and highlights the component parts that go into mapping a semantic to a pragmatic meaning. Various aspects of this mapping such as presuppositions, reference, speech acts, etc. are investigated. The notion of context is examined from the perspective of fictional and iterated contexts.