Is the study of how hearers, have to combine semantic knowledge with other types of knowledge
and make inferences in order to interpret a speaker meaning
deixis
social deixis
Social deixis concerns the social information that is encoded within various expressions, such as
relative social status and familiarity
spatial deixis
concerns itself with the spatial locations relevant to an utterance
person
Person deixis concerns itself with the grammatical persons involved in an utterance
short hands
Much of reference involves reliance on context, together with some calculation of the part of the
speaker and the hearers.
knowledge as context
a speaker choosing how to make reference to an entity must take estimations of what her hearers
know.
discourse as context
in conversing, participants construct a notion of what the discourse is about
background kowledge as context
the knowledge a speaker might calculate other would have before, or independently of, a particular
conversation, by virtue of membership in a community
mutual knowledge
One important point about this background knowledge is that while the speaker makes guesses
about the knowledge her listeners have, there is no certainty. It is probably a mistake to identify this
background knowledge with mutual knowledge.
inference
Is an special sub-type of coreference, a referential relation between expressions where they both
refer to the same entity.
conversational implicature
approach to the speaker’s and hearer’s cooperative use of inference. There seems to be enough
regularity in the inference-forming behavior of listeners for speakers to exploit this by implying
something, rather than stating in