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Our main objective is to provide an account of the meaning of the polysemous adjective real that is theoretically grounded in post-Gricean pragmatics (Carston [2002], Recanati [2003], Sperber & Wilson [1996]). Combining lexical semantics and linguistic pragmatics is not new (see, e.g., Depraetere [2014] and Carston [2021]) and we believe that it can lead to a better understanding of the actual use of lexemes in context – especially when they are polysemous. Drawing on two pragmatic mechanisms, modulation and disambiguation (or lack thereof), we show how they interact with the lexical content of real and illustrate with genuine occurrences taken from ICE-GB (all of which we systematically annotated semantically). Little attention has been paid to the adjective real in the literature (with some exceptions: Bolinger [1972], Magnusson [2003]). Real is an untypical adjective. Its meaning is scalar when it causes a potentially gradable head noun (Filippi-Deswelle [2014], Moreau [2022]) to be semantically adjusted by indicating that a high (or high enough) degree is reached for a property or set or properties associated with that noun while, syntactically, it shows a very strong bias towards the attributive function – which we measure within ICE-GB and then explain.

This paper explores the connection between general pragmatic principles (Cooperation, Relevance). Implicit content is a broad category. Post-Gricean pragmatics has consistently shown that inferences already come into play in order to derive « what is said », or explicatures, rolling back the boundaries of the notion of implicit meaning. I argue that the general pragmatic principles postulated are not unlikely to be honoured in the breach (as in cases of frontal verbal aggression), which compromises their validity. However they can be partly dispensed with if, following Recanati (2004), we assume that an associative, parallel model of processing is sufficient to reconstruct « what is said ». Yet they still need to be invoked minimally to derive a specific class of assumptions presented here, as well as to account for the fact that some general presumption of cooperation or relevance appears to be made by default (with no evidence to the contrary), inviting hearers to provide a modicum of interpretative effort when the meaning of an utterance is not immediately clear.

Multi-robot exploration consists in coordinating robots for mapping an unknown environment. It raises several issues concerning task allocation, robot control, path planning and communication. We study exploration in populated environments, in which pedestrian flows can severely impact performances. However, humans have adaptive skills for taking advantage of these flows while moving. Therefore, in order to exploit these human abilities, we propose a novel exploration strategy that explicitly allows for human-robot interactions. Our model for exploration in populated environments combines the classical frontier-based strategy with our interactive approach. We implement interactions where robots can locally choose a human guide to follow and define a parametric heuristic to balance interaction and frontier assignments. Finally, we evaluate to which extent human presence impacts our exploration model in terms of coverage ratio, travelled distance and elapsed time to completion.

This paper provides a theoretical exploration of the notion of politeness in its interaction with Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Principle. It is argued that politeness, as well as those two inference principles, are underpinned by a general aspiration to interpersonal harmony, and that the pragmatic mechanisms to which they relate operate at two distinct analytical levels.