Recent work in relevance-theoretic pragmatics develops the idea that understanding verbal utterances involves processes of ad hoc concept construction. The resulting concepts may be narrower or looser than the lexical concepts which provide the input to the process. Two of the many issues

of explanation. In this chapter, we will propose a more unified account. We will try to show that narrowing, loosening and metaphorical extension are simply different outcomes of a single interpretive process which creates an ad hoc concept, or occasion-specific sense, based on interaction among encoded concepts

cases of metaphorically-used language. Taking a broadly Fodorian view that lexical concepts are atomic (unstructured), this paper looks at some issues raised by the idea that addressees infer ad hoc concepts as part of the on-line comprehension process. As a cognitive-scientific theory, RT is open

Abstract This paper addresses the issue of newspaper-headline interpretation by questioning standard assumptions on how headlines are designed on the basis of largely prescriptive pragmatic guidelines or norms. The main questions examined are firstly, whether 'appropriate headlines' from the writer's perspective converge with 'effective headlines' from the reader's perspective, and secondly, whether there is a pragmatic heuristic which can explain in psychologically plausible terms the way headlines are selected and interpreted by newspaper readers. Drawing on 137 readers' reaction to a selection of UK/US newspaper headlines and on a corpus of 1310 reader-selected headlines, it is shown that headline readers tend to disregard standard norms such as length, clarity, and information as long as headlines rivet their attention in terms of creative style regardless of underdetermined semantic meaning. Using the framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95;

I propose that an account of metaphor understanding which covers the full range of cases has to allow for two routes or modes of processing. One is a process of rapid, local, on-line concept construction that applies quite generally to the recovery of word meaning in utterance comprehension

server. Hence, Web usage analysis requires a preparatory mechanism that incorporates the business goals, the concepts reflecting them and the expert’s background knowledge on them into the mining process. To this purpose, we present a methodology and a mechanism for the establishment and exploitation

Ad hoc networks are a new wireless networking paradigm for mobile hosts. Unlike traditional mobile wireless networks, ad hoc networks do not rely on any fixed infrastructure. Instead, hosts rely on each other to keep the network connected. The military tactical and other security

Early simulation experience with wireless ad hoc networks suggests that their capacity can be surprisingly low, due to the requirement that nodes forward each others’ packets. The achievable capacity depends on network size, traffic patterns, and detailed local radio interactions. This paper

An ad-hoc network is the cooperative engagement of a collection of mobile nodes without the required intervention of any centralized access point or existing infrastructure. In this paper we present Ad-hoc On Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV), a novel algorithm for the operation of such ad-hoc

The capacity of ad-hoc wireless networks is constrained by the mutual interference of concurrent transmissions between nodes. We study a model of an ad-hoc network where n nodes communicate in random source-destination pairs. These nodes are assumed to be mobile. We examine the per