A Formal and Computational Characterization of Pragmatic Infelicities

We study the logical properties that characterize pragmatic inferences and we show that classical understanding of notions such as entailment and defeasibility is not enough if one wants to explain infelicities that occur when a pragmatic inference is cancelled. We show that infelicities can be detected if a special kind of inference is considered, namely infelicitously defeasible inference. We also show how one can use strati ed logic, a linguistically motivated formalism that accommodates indefeasible, infelicitously defeasible, and felicitously defeasible inferences, to reason about pragmatic inferences and detect infelicities associated with utterances. The formalism yields an algorithm for detecting infelicities, which has been implemented in Lisp.