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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1999. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-62).

Thesis (M.A.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2005. / Bibliography: leaves 64-70.

This thesis explores the role, if any, that implicature plays as a strategy in informal debate. Transcripts of spontaneous debates from television and radio public affairs talk shows were analyzed with a focus on the use of implicature as a strategic rhetorical tool employed to gain advantage in an argument.

Implication is a logical connective corresponding to the rule of causality "if ... then ...". Implications allow one to organize knowledge of some field of application in an intuitive and convenient manner. This thesis explores possibilities of automatic construction of all valid implications (implicative theory) in a given field. As the main method for constructing implicative theories a robust active learning technique called Attribute Exploration was used. Attribute Exploration extracts knowledge from existing data and offers a possibility of refining this knowledge via providing counter-examples. In frames of the project implicative theories were constructed automatically for two mathematical domains: algebraic identities and parametrically expressible functions. This goal was achieved thanks both pragmatical approach of Attribute Exploration and discoveries in respective fields of application. The two diverse application fields favourably illustrate different possible usage patterns of Attribute Exploration for automatic construction of implicative theories.