ENG302 -- Topic: Semantics and Pragmatics - Assignment 7 James Madison University

Instructions: [Your answers to this assignment should be written out clearly (or typed :) ). As an "ungraded" assignment, your work will be collected but will be marked only as an acceptable or unacceptable effort.]

• Review the "Assumed Familiarity" hierarchy in Prince 1981. (The overall taxonomy is shown in the tree structure diagram p.237; the details are in section 3.3.) Then, look at the "dragon story" available on Bb under Course Documents. Find all the referring expressions (noun phrases) and attempt to determine the level of assumed familiarity for each one. If you're not sure about different kinds of "new," "inferrable," or "evoked" information, try to at least assign the examples to one of these three categories. :)
• Do each of the following (based on some basic concepts from Portner, Ch. 10):
  
  1. Find a naturally occuring sentence that contains a classic indexical word.
  2. Write down a presupposition of the sentence "Harvey definitely should not have another cup of coffee."
  3. Create a sentence, the utterance of which could be an indirect speech act. Write down the sentence, a relevant context in which it could be used, and the illocutionary force (the intended communicative action of the speaker) for that sentence in that context.