Presents a novel formalism for representing the notion of approximation to the truth, and analyzes the meanings of these expressions in terms of this formalism. Pragmatic looseness of this kind should be distinguished from authentic truth-conditional vagueness. (Author/VWL)

Argues for the description of thematic roles as two-cluster concepts called Proto-Agent and Proto-Patient, each characterized by a set of verbal entailments. It is asserted that an argument of a verb may bear on either or both proto-roles to varying degrees, according to the number and kind of entailments provided by the verb. (133 references) (JL)

Demonstrates through an examination of naturally occurring discourse that Wh-Clefts and It-Clefts are not interchangeable; they have highly specialized distributions and functions. (EJS)

A report of an investigation of conversations involving more than two persons. Two types of illocutionary acts are accounted for: the traditional kind directed at the addressee(s) and another, called an informative, addressed to all participants. Evidence is presented that every illocutionary act is performed by means of an informative. (AMH)

Presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an examination of a large corpus of naturally occurring tokens. It is argued that inversion serves an information-packaging function and that felicitous inversion depends on the relative discourse-familiarity of the information represented by the preposed and postposed…

An initial description of the links between cognitive input, discourse rules, and the rules of sentence grammar is made, based on a technique developed for observing the translation of cognitive input into language in a spontaneous, practical speech event: descriptions of the lay-outs of apartments. (Author/RM)

Presents an account of existential "there"-sentences in which the postverbal negative phrase (NP) is required to represent a "hearer-new" entity. The article identifies five types of formally definite yet hearer-new NPs that may occur in "there"-sentences. The restriction against definite NPs in "there"-sentences results from a mismatch in…