Machine Semiotics

The descriptive meaning of an utterance, such as "I go to grandma now" results compositionally from the meaning of its linguistic constituents, phrases and eventually single words. For the present example, we consider a speaker to whom the personal pronoun "I" is referring to. Moreover, this speaker announces her departure from the current place using present tense ("go") in the sense of nearest future ("now") with a locative goal ("to grandma"). The pragmatic sense of this utterance depends upon its respective context and the respective focusses. Thus, focusing upon departure from the current place may indicate the hearer's privacy at the soonest. In different contexts, the focus might be centered at the intention or the speaker's relationship to her grandma, e.g., in such a way, that visiting the grandmother implicates getting a substantial money gift. Yet for the following let us assume that the hearer is a heating device in a speechassistive smart home environment, i.e. a cognitive heating (Klimczak et al 2014, Huber et al 2018). In this case, the abovementioned utterance could simply mean that in the nearest future, no further heating power will be required. This meaning results on the one hand from the heating's range of possible actions, which could be, in the simplest case, either Machine Semiotics 3