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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

Grice (1957) drew a famous distinction between natural(N) and non-natural(NN) meaning, where what is meant(NN) is broadly equivalent to what is intentionally communicated. This paper argues that Grice’s dichotomy overlooks the fact that spontaneously occurring natural signs may be intentionally shown, and hence used in intentional communication. It also argues that some naturally occurring behaviours have a signalling function, and that the existence of such natural codes provides further evidence that Grice’s original distinction was not exhaustive. The question of what kind of information, in cognitive terms, these signals encode is also examined. 1

As a post-Gricean pragmatic theory, Relevance Theory (RT) takes as its starting point the question of how hearers bridge the gap between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. That there is such a gap has been a given of linguistic philosophy since Grice’s (1967) Logic and Conversation. But the account that relevance theory offers of how this gap is bridged,

This paper is concerned with the simulation of human-like capabilities in synthetic characters within the domain of Personal and Social Education. Our aim was to achieve socially meaningful and engaging interactions with children in the 8-12 age group to enable an exploration of bullying and coping strategies. In this paper, we consider the engagement between the interacting partners, focusing particularly on the affective and empathic aspects of this relationship. We have used Theory of Mind methods to enable us to evaluate children’s understanding of social scenarios and the thinking of others. The results from this 345 children study highlight that children are able to recognise and interpret affect in synthetic characters and are empathically engaged with the characters in the scenarios. 1

Prosody provides both ‘natural’ and properly linguistic input to utterance comprehension. It contributes not only to overt communication but to covert or accidental forms of information transmission. Its function is typically to convey emotions or attitudes or to alter the salience of available interpretations. How should these aspects of communication be described and explained? This paper takes a relevance-theoretic approach, focusing on four main issues: (a) how should the communication of emotions or attitudes be analysed? (b) how do ‘natural’ prosodic elements contribute to communication? (c) what does prosody encode? (d) what light can prosody shed on the place of pragmatics in the architecture of the mind?

Propositional attitudes represent a highly debated topic within the philosophical semantic tradition of research, as well as within the truthconditionally oriented branch of semantics, and they have persistently provided very lively and problematic areas for discussion.

The paradigm of generative approaches to language acquisition is the focus of critical attention here. Although much ink has been spent on the comparative merits of different approaches, this can detract from attention to the details within a paradigm. Thus what is not part of this paper is any attempt to compare competing paradigms in language acquisition research. The task of reviewing twenty years of intense research is too grandiose: instead, four representative lines of empirical work with broad theoretical significance and a substantial cross-linguistic base are chosen to illustrate how debates within the paradigm are structured. Theoretical and methodological commitments of researchers can be seen to vary considerably, and most importantly, to interact. The goal is a selective map to reveal the structure of arguments, and to ask whether we are making progress. The paper is structured as follows. In Section 1.1 the two basic principles that provide the title to this paper are introduced, together with a sketch of the reasons why the four empirical examples are chosen. In Section 1.2 a more complete history of the principles is given, after which in Section 2, the general character of the arguments used

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