Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper addresses part of the question "how do we say the same thing in different ways in order to communicate non-literal, pragmatic information?". Since the style of the text can communicate much information — it may be stuffy, slangy, prissy — generators that seek to satisfy pragmatic, hearer-related goals in addition to simple informative ones must have rules that control how and when different styles are used. But what is "style" ? In this paper,formal and informal language is analysed to provide stylistic rules that enable a program to produce texts of various levels of formahty