Situation And Constraint: Pragmatic Inferences On Communication Through Web Forums

Catering to the development of computer technology and artificial intelligence since the 20^th century, semantic issues in natural language become more and more important, especially the formalization of natural language in researches on semantics.In addition, different from the traditional models, communicating with people through internet becomes a common model with its rapid development, and new characteristics appear,e.g.,the virtual circumstance of communicating, communication through a third-party platform. Adopting situation theory and constraint theory from situation semantics, this article tries to study communicating through web forums and aims to propose a general frame of pragmatic inference.After reviewing traditional researches on contexts and pragmatic inferences, we introduce two concepts-situations and constraint, starting from which a general frame of pragmatic inferences of web forum communication will be constructed. With the introduction to the basic concepts and methods of formalization in situation semantics, this article attempts to formalize the pragmatic inference of communication through web forums.