Abstract
The paper presents a program that models information exchange in natural language via a multiagent system in which – parallel to a changing model of the outside world – relevant segments of information states of Agents communicating with each other can be monitored by Users from step to step. The theoretical background is provided by ℜeALIS, ‘Reciprocal and Lifelong Interpretation System’: a two-layered dynamic pragmasemantic theory. The software executes generalized truth evaluation in a set of possible-world-like objects partially ordered via a label system defined by a recursive technique. The dynamic character is captured as follows: the program essentially models intensional profiles associated with Agents’ Utterances as transition rules of finite-state automata, the states of which are Phases, sums of moments of information states of the Agents thinking about the world outside and each other. It is also a crucial feature of ℜeALIS that it is a two-layered interpretation system: the Agents who can function as Speakers and Hearers take conventionalized Addresser and Addressee roles, defined in ℜeALIS as complex intensional profiles. As for practical applications of programs implementing the ℜeALIS model of human communication, it is of great importance in several areas of life and work to store information so that not only the pieces of information themselves be saved but, for each piece of data, information on such circumstances as who knows it, who knows about whom that the latter person knows or does not know it, who is authorized to reveal it, and who is assumed to be interested in its modification. It is worth learning from human ways of storing and organizing information as much as possible.
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- 1.
Oishi [16] offers (p. 338) a (terminological re-) interpretation of Austin’s [14 felicity conditions (pp. 14–15) as follows: “To clarify how an illocutionary act is performed felicitously and brings about an effect, let us specify the terminology. A particular speaker in a given case who makes an utterance… is distinguished from the performer who performs a particular illocutionary act…, whom we call the addresser of the act. The hearer to whom the speaker speaks… is also distinguished from the person to whom the illocutionary act is performed…, whom we call the addressee of the act. The circumstances of the situation in which an utterance is made… Are distinguished from the context of the act… The illocutionary act brings about its conventional effect when (i) the speaker, the hearer, and the circumstances of the speech situation are assumed to be the addresser, the addressee, and the context of the act, respectively…, (ii) the speaker follows the procedure correctly…, (iii) the hearer ratifies the act (or the speaker makes a specific sequel) for the procedure to be completed…, (iv) the speaker has the thought or feeling, or intention of the addresser of the act…, and (v) the speaker or the hearer conducts her/himself subsequently as is specified for the addresser/addressee of the act.”.
- 2.
Lauer’s formal-semantics based Dynamic Pragmatics [19] has the same point of departure as that of ℜeALIS, in contrast to less formal branches of pragmatics (pp. 4–5): “There is surprisingly little work on the conventional link between clauses of different types and their use, at least in the formally-oriented semantics literature. There was some early work on this issue in philosophy …, but soon, it seems, researchers abandoned the issue. In part this was likely due to the fact that the dominant paradigm in speech act theory … made the project of assigning a conventionally-specified use to sentences based on their type seem hopeless: Sentences of any given type can be used to perform acts of almost any given Searlean illocutionary type. Developing a systematic framework for studying the conventionally specified use of sentences of different types is thus a very timely project. Secondly, it is this conventional connection between sentences and their use that connects semantic content, as it is studied in linguistics, with language use, and inferences about utterance choice. As I just pointed out, the classical Gricean account of implicatures [18] starts from the assumption that a speaker utters a (declarative) sentence in order to convey information, and thus… Presupposes an answer to the question of how sentences are conventionally associated with a certain use. And if we want to take a Gricean perspective more generally – if we want to investigate how interlocutors reason about each other’s action choices – we need to know how the contents we study in linguistic semantics relate to the use of sentences. An understanding of clause typing thus is central to developing a formal framework that lets us take a pragmatic perspective in general.” Lauer qualifies his approach (p. 1) as “pragmatics, in a broadly Gricean sense. It is not… About conversational implicatures, at least not in the classical sense of the term. [It concentrates]… on a question that may seem quite un-Gricean, due to its focus on linguistic convention: What kind of linguistic convention makes it so that sentences of different types – such as declaratives, interrogatives and imperatives – are used in different ways, and support different kinds of pragmatic inferences? This question, however, will be addressed from a very Gricean angle. Pragmatic inference is construed as language users’ reasoning about utterance events. Or, more precisely, as language users’ reasoning about how utterance events are chosen. A central aim… is to show that consistently taking such a perspective is fruitful, indeed, necessary if we want to understand language use.”.
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Supported by the ÚNKP-21–2-I New National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology from the source of the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund.
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Szeteli, Á. et al. (2023). Implementation of Two-Layered Dynamic Pragmatics. In: Arai, K. (eds) Intelligent Systems and Applications. IntelliSys 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 544. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16075-2_42
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