A computational account of illocutionary meaning

Abstract

This paper looks at how illocutionary meaning could be accommodated in FunGramKB, a Natural Language Processing environment designed as a multipurpose lexico-conceptual knowledge base for natural language understanding applications. To this purpose, this study concentrates on the Grammaticon, which is the module that stores constructional schemata or machine-tractable representations of linguistic constructions. In particular, the aim of this paper is to discuss how illocutionary constructions such as Can You Forgive Me (XPREP)? have been translated into the metalanguage employed in FunGramKB, namely Conceptual Representation Language (COREL). The formalization of illocutionary constructions presented here builds on previous constructionist approaches, especially on those developed within the usage-based constructionist model known as the Lexical Constructional Model (Ruiz de Mendoza 2013). To illustrate our analysis, we shall focus on the speech act of CONDOLING, which is computationally handled through two related constructional domains, each of which subsumes several illocutionary configurations under one COREL schema