• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.9 no.spc
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• pp.149-165
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• 2003

This paper is aimed at the investigation of pragmatic contributions to the identification of explicatures. An explicature is the result of fleshing out the semantic representation of an utterance. The basic assumption of the paper is that the process of the developing the semantic representation into an explicature depends heavily on contextual information. Therefore, we are concerned with the way in which hearers use contextual information to flesh rut or develop the semantic representation of an utterance. The identification of explicatures includes both the recovery of the proposition expressed and the recovery of what we called higher-level explicatures. There are three subtasks involved in the recovery of the proposition expressed: reference assignment disambiguation and enrichment On the other hand, there are two subtasks involved in the recovery of higher-level explicatures: attitudes and speech acts.