Cognitive Pragmatics

Abstract

If pragmatics is the study of human communication (with a specific focus on verbal language) in context, cognitive pragmatics can be defined as the study of the psychological processes and states involved in that activity. As a matter of fact, however, its focus is almost exclusively on language understanding, while very little attention has been paid to language production. Cognitive pragmatics has grown out of a tradition rooted in philosophy and linguistics. Philosophical pragmatics has especially provided two general frameworks. One is Paul Grice’s theory, according to which comprehension is essentially an inferential process, through which the addressee reconstructs the communicative intention behind the speaker’s use of a certain utterance in context. Grice coins the word “implicature” to refer to this inferential transition from what the utterance conventionally says to what the speaker intends with it in a specific context. The other framework is John Austin’s theory of speech acts, which stays closer to Wittgenstein’s idea that utterances are to be understood as components of linguistic games, that is, they gain their specific contextual meaning against the background of (more or less) conventional activities the speakers are engaged in. Within philosophical pragmatics, a synthesis of the two approaches has been proposed by Strawson and Searle, but while Grice’s framework has deeply influenced the development of psychologically oriented research in pragmatics, Austin’s approach is often preferred by scholars who claim to be interested in normative, rather than psychological, views of language use. Starting from Grice’s framework, cognitive pragmatics has gone beyond him in exploring the idea that there must be some specific psychological mechanism responsible for the contextual, intention-based inferences involved in comprehension, and that this is what ensures a theoretically robust definition of pragmatics as distinct from semantics. This theoretical investigation of the mechanism(s) underlying pragmatic understanding is older than their relatively recent experimental assessment, whether by psycholinguistic methods (experimental pragmatics in a strict sense) or by neuroscientific and clinical ones (neuropragmatics and clinical pragmatics). Here the focus will be on this theoretical level of description—we might describe it as theoretical psychology of (verbal) understanding—in a middle ground between traditional philosophical pragmatics and more recent experimental pragmatics.