Linguistic Meaning, Communicated Meaning and Cognitive Pragmatics (original) (raw)
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Intercultural Pragmatics, 2000
In his book and article Cognitive Pragmatics, Bruno Bara presents a "unified" theoretical account of the mental processes involved in communication (Bara 2010,2011). Through its inclusion of different strands of research, this account is broader than that advanced by any of its predecessors (e.g. Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory 1995 [1986]). In this way, the centrality of behavior games-a notion that echoes Wittgenstein's concept of a language gamebrings a much-needed social dimension to a cognitive explanation of communicative processes. The emphasis on the validation of key claims through the study of how pragmatic skills develop in children and become disrupted through disease and injury places the somewhat neglected areas of developmental pragmatics and clinical pragmatics, respectively, at the center of theoretical work in pragmatics. The use of modern brain imaging techniques (e.g., fMRI) to establish the neural correlates of communicative processes introduces the nascent discipline of neuropragmatics into pragmatic theorizing. As this list demonstrates (and it is not an exhaustive list by any means), there is plenty to engage the reader in Bara's cognitive pragmatics. The issues I want to address are the role of theorizing in pragmatics and whether a "theory" of the mental processes involved in communication is even intelligible. To this extent, while applying to Bara's proposals, my comments are also relevant to theory construction more widely in pragmatics.
COGNITIVE PRAGMATICS: APPROACHES AND PERSPECTIVES
COGNITIVE PRAGMATICS: APPROACHES AND PERSPECTIVES, 2019
In the twenty-first century, cognitive pragmatics has become a novel and booming research discipline which synthesizes pragmatic and cognitive explanations of human communication. There is a vast number of approaches to cognitive pragmatics resulting both from different theoretical underpinnings and specific ethnic and social-cultural prerequisites of their development, so establishing the principles related to cognitive-pragmatic communication studies has become an urgent necessity. This article fills this gap by adopting theoretical insight into the leading cognitive-pragmatic approaches in western and Ukrainian linguistics. I claim that various approaches in cognitive pragmatics can be roughly divided according to the two leading vectors of theoretical perspectives: from cognitive-to pragmatic and from pragmatic-to cognitive frameworks of analysis. As my discussion demonstrates, growing numbers of empirical and theoretical studies examine cognitive-pragmatic aspects of both utterances / speech acts and discourses, namely their principles of politeness / impoliteness and discourse strategies, in intercultural and historical perspectives. The theoretic rationale for these studies is clear enough. Mental state attribution is integral to pragmatic and cognitive interpretation of processes of human communication. In cognitive pragmatics, which is characterized by highly synthetic and hybrid nature, this attribution is viewed holistically. The article reveals the distinctive characteristics of Ukrainian cognitive-pragmatic studies as compared to western researches. It proves that the cognitive-pragmatic interpretation of the construal of meaning-in-context in various discourses and utterances will have further implications in linguistics and humanities.
Pragmatics, Discourse, and Cognition
2013
While the field of pragmatics includes a great variety of approaches to language use, most pragmatic research can be related to two fairly broad traditions and one recent development : linguistic-philosophical pragmatics (or so-called Anglo-American pragmatics), sociocultural-interactional pragmatics (or so-called European-Continental pragmatics) and intercultural pragmatics. Linguistic-philosophical pragmatics seeks to investigate speaker meaning within an utterance-based framework focusing mainly on linguistic constraints on language use. Sociocultural interactional pragmatics maintains that pragmatics should include research into social and cultural constraints on language use as well. The link between classical philosophically-oriented pragmatics and research in intercultural and inter-language communication has led to the development of intercultural pragmatics, focusing on the roles and functions of language and communication within a world-wide communication network. Intercul...
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 1995
This article inquires into the role of meaning in linguistic pragmatics (conceived in its widest interdisciplinary sense as a cognitive, social, and cultural perspective on language and communication). With reference to earlier discussions of the relationship between meaning and intention, especially in the anthropological linguistic literature, two case studies are adduced in order to further demonstrate the need to allow for types of meaning which do not depend exclusively or primarily on individual intentionality (even when dealing with language use in a mainstream Western context), and also to show how taking nonintentional forms of meaning into account can be done systematically in a theoretically and methodologically justifiable way. The first one focuses on the dynamics of interactional processes, the second on different degrees of salience which even result in direct contradictions between the level of implicit meaning and communicatively transparent information. The conclusion is that a straightforward pragmatic perspective allows linguists to return to the question, What is the meaning of expression X in context Y?, rather than to stick with the Gricean question, What did the language user intend X to mean in context Y?, even though the latter provided a major impetus for the development of the field of pragmatics in the first place.
In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2003), Semantics is defined as the study of the meanings of words and phrases in language and/or the meanings of words and phrases in a particular context. This definition involves the historical and psychological study and the classification of changes in the signification of words or forms viewed as factors in linguistic development. In addition, the definition includes the language used (as in advertising or political propaganda) to achieve a desired effect on an audience especially through the use of words with novel or dual meanings. Oxford Dictionary (?) defines semantics as that branch of linguistics and logic that is concerned with meaning. At vocabulary.com (?) it is defined as the study of meaning in language. It can be applied to entire texts or to single words. For example, "destination" and "last stop" technically mean the same thing. Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, linguistics and anthropology.[Mey 1993]. Unlike semantics, which examines meaning that is conventional or "coded" in a given language, pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on structural and linguistic knowledge (e.g., grammar, lexicon, etc.) of the speaker and listener, but also on the context of the utterance, any pre-existing knowledge about those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and other factors.[Shaozhong, 2009]. In this respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity, since meaning relies on the manner, place, time etc. of an utterance.[wikipedia]. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence.. [Daejin et. al. 2002], [Masahiro 2008], [Dale 1989].