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MASTER'S THESIS PRESENTATION

                    -Thursday, October 8, 1992

Cameron  Shelley,  graduate  student, Dept. Comp. Sci.,
Univ.  of  Waterloo,  will  speak  on  "Speech acts and
Pragmatics in Sentence Generation"

TIME:                 3:00-4:00 p.m.

ROOM:                 DC 1331

ABSTRACT

A  fundamental advance in recent theories about natural
language   pragmatics  involves  the  realization  that
people  use language not just to describe propositions,
but also to perform actions.  This idea can be taken as
a given starting point for investigating the questions:
how  are  linguistic actions, or speech acts, performed
and understood? How far can descriptions, as locutions,
be  used as speech acts?  What role does inference play
in the performance and understanding of speech acts?

Many previous theories of speech acts have taken speech
acts   to   be   independent  and  primitive  units  of
communication,   implicit   in,   but   separate  from,
description and inference.  In this thesis, I argue for
an  alternative  model  of speech acts.  I propose that
speech  acts  can  be  explained  by  a  combination of
description  and  inference, without the requirement of
separate  conventions.  This explanation relies instead
on  an  account of explicit linguistic units, including
clausal  moods  and  performative verbs, in addition to
the   inferential   mechanism   provided   by   Gricean
conversational implicature.

In  addition  to  outlining a model for the description
and  comparison  of  speech  acts,  I  present  a small
sentence generator that partially implements the model,
and  discuss  how it can be enhanced in future. Also, I
illustrate  the  relevance  of this model for a current
computational  theory  of syntactic style.  My model of
speech  acts  suggests how this computational stylistic
theory can be extended into the areas of semantic style
and lexical style.