This paper is designed to illustrate and consider the relations between three types of metarepresentational ability used in verbal comprehension: the ability to metarepresent attributed thoughts, the ability to metarepresent attributed utterances, and the ability to metarepresent abstract, non-attributed representations (e.g. sentence types, utterance types, propositions). Aspects of these abilities have been separately considered in the literatures on “theory of mind”, Gricean pragmatics and quotation. The aim of this paper is to show how the results of these separate strands of research might be integrated with an empirically plausible pragmatic theory. 1

The set of English modal verbs is widely recognized to communicate two broad clusters of meanings: epistemic and root modal meanings. A number of researchers have claimed that root meanings are acquired earlier than epistemic ones; this claim has subsequently been employed in the linguistics literature as an argument for the position that English modal verbs are polysemous (Sweetser, 1990). In this paper I offer an alternative explanation for the later emergence of epistemic interpretations by linking them to the development of the child's theory of mind (Wellman, 1990); if correct, this hypothesis might have important implications for the shape of the semantics of modal verbs.

In this paper I reconsider Sweetser's (1990) proposal to include 'speech-act modality' in the categories of modality expressed by natural language alongside the traditional cases of root and epistemic modality. I propose a reanalysis of her examples using the relevance-theoretic notion of metarepresentation. Rather than assuming that there is a separate speech-act domain for modal operators in natural language to range over, I suggest that the material embedded under modal operators is sometimes used metarepresentationally, a possibility which is independently motivated and well manifested in other logical operators. 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

It is widely assumed in the developmental literature that certain classes of modal expression appear later in language acquisition than others; specifically, epistemic interpretations lag behind non-epistemic (or root) interpretations. An explanation for these findings is proposed in terms of the child's developing theory of mind, i.e. the ability to attribute to oneself and others mental representations, and to reason inferentially about them. It is hypothesized that epistemic modality crucially implicates theory-of-mind abilities and is therefore expected to depend on prior developments in the child's ability to handle representations of mental representations. In support of this hypothesis, it is shown that autistic individuals (who arguably possess a deficient theory-of-mind mechanism) have difficulty with epistemics.

Temporal uncertainty in raw data can impede the inference of temporal and causal relationships between events and compromise the output of data-to-text NLG systems. In this paper, we introduce a framework to reason with and represent temporal uncertainty from the raw data to the generated text, in order to provide a faithful picture to the user of a particular situation. The model is grounded in experimental data from multiple languages, shedding light on the generality of the approach. 1