ABSTRACT

Communication pervades modern technology; because of this, linguistics, especially pragmatics, is relevant to engineering. We build machines that exchange not only energy, but also information. Control signals are no longer simple things. An automobile has as many as two dozen microprocessors, all communicating. Even a Nikon autofocus camera has four or more CPUs in a local-area network. Meanwhile, the Internet is enabling our machines to communicate with each other globally. Pragmatics, the newest major area of linguistics, is as relevant to machines as it is to human speech. Pragmatics is defined as the relation of language to context and purpose. That is, phonology tells you how to pronounce things, syntax tells you how to put words together, semantics tells you what the utterances mean, and pragmatics tells you what you should say, to whom, when, and why.