Expressions, Utterances and Directive Slots

The same linguistic entity can play a directive or a descriptive role, e.g. “cook dinner” can be moved from a column “to do” in a Kanban board to a column “done”. We propose to account for such directive roles by enriching a previous framework of slot mereology for informational entities with the notion of directive slot. We differentiate expressions from the utterances they constitute in order to accommodate for the insight from the literature in pragmatics that most (if not all) expressions can constitute directive utterances in the appropriate context. We propose axioms involving constitution, slot-having and slot-filling on utterances, and articulate this theory with former work on directing actions.