| Since Austin introduced the term infelicity, the linguistic literature has been flooded with its use. However, no formal or computational explanation has been given for infelicity. This thesis provides one for those infelicities that occur when a pragmatic inference is cancelled.;We exploit a well-known difference between pragmatic and semantic information: since implicatures and presuppositions are not specifically uttered, pragmatic inferences are defeasible, while most of semantic inferences are indefeasible. Our contribution assumes the existence of a finer grained taxonomy with respect to pragmatic inferences. It is shown that if one wants to account for the natural language expressiveness, one should distinguish between pragmatic inferences that are felicitous to defeat and pragmatic inference that are infelicitously defeasible. Thus, it is shown that one should consider at least three types of information: indefeasible, felicitously defeasible, and infelicitously defeasible. The cancellation of the last of these determines the pragmatic infelicities.;A new formalism has been devised to accommodate the three levels of information, called stratified logic. Within it, we are able to express formally notions such as utterance u presupposes p or utterance u is infelicitous. The formalism yields an algorithm for computing interpretations for utterances, for determining their associated presuppositions, and for signalling infelicities. Its implementation is a Lisp program that takes as input a set of stratified formulas that constitute the necessary semantic and pragmatic knowledge and the logical translation of an utterance or set of utterances and that computes a set of optimistic interpretations of the given utterances. The program computes for each set of utterances the associated presuppositions and signals when an infelicitous sentence has been uttered. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
