Encompasses a variety of topics under the umbrella of pragmatic meaning and cognition. This includes theoretical perspectives on pragmatic meaning. Deixis, speech acts and implicature are also covered.

The ten volumes of "Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights" focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While other volumes select philosophical, grammatical, social, variational, interactional, or discursive angles, this third volume focuses on the interface between language and cognition. Language use is impossible without the mobilization of a large variety of cognitive processes, each serving a different purpose. During the last half century cognitive approaches to language have been particularly successful, and the broad spectrum of contributions to this volume testify to this success. As cognitive approaches to language are by definition a subset of the larger enterprise of cognitive science, a contribution on this general topic sets the stage. This is joined by a chapter on cognitive grammar, a theoretical study of the architecture of human language that is deeply inspired by general cognitive principles. A chapter on experimentation offers a crash-course on basic issues of experimental design and on the rationale behind statistical testing in general and the most important statistical tests in particular, offering a methodological toolkit for understanding many of the other contributions. Different chapters cover a broad range of topics: language acquisition, psycholinguistics, specialized topics within the latter field (e.g. the bilingual mental lexicon, categorization), and aspects of language awareness. Some chapters home in on what have become indispensible perspectives on the cognitive underpinnings of language: the way language is represented and processed in the human brain and simulation studies. The ever-growing success of the latter type of studies is exemplified, for instance, by the highly flourishing connectionist tradition and the more general paradigm of artificial intelligence, each of which is dealt with in a separate contribution.

This book contains essential contributions to enrich and broaden the application field of pragmatics. It provides an example of how the fruitful reflections and refined conceptual distinctions born in the philosophical field can find a practical application in addressing social, cognitive, clinical, and psychological problems. Its chapters address, from different points of view, the relationship between pragmatic linguistics and philosophy, and outline the possible application of pragmatic theories to different domains. Developed during the third Pragmasophia international conference, whose name is derived from the Greek terms πρᾶγμα (action, fact) and σοφία (knowledge, science), the book aligns itself with its aim to study human actions and activities and how they take shape through language. But ‘Pragma’ and ‘Sophia’ also signal another purpose: highlighting the importance of creating links between empirical investigations on language use, and more traditional philosophical approaches. In this reading, ‘Pragma’ represents the experimental goal devoted to analysing and interpreting language facts. In contrast, the term ‘Sophia’ recalls the original vocation of past philosophers to pursue an ideal of ‘pure knowledge’, disconnected from any practical-economic interest. While maintaining the conference's original purpose of encouraging productive comparisons between different approaches, the book consists of two sections: first, on philosophical approaches, recalls more theoretical aspects (closer to the term ‘Sophia’); the second, ‘Inferential and Cognitive Pragmatics,’ addresses more practical issues affecting domains such as Greek literature, pragmatic disorders, dictionary entries, and speech analysis. The reader, whether in linguists, philosophy or psychology, obtains a complete overview of the most advanced current research lines, both theoretical and empirical, and thus contributes to broadening the scope of pragmatics.

The book aims to serve as a theoretical framework for the socio-cognitive approach (SCA) that is an alternative to the two main lines of pragmatics research: linguistic-philosophical pragmatics and sociocultural-interactional pragmatics. SCA broadens the scope of the field with an intent to incorporate not only L1 communication but also intercultural communication, and communication in a second language. The author integrates the pragmatic view of cooperation and the cognitive view of egocentrism and emphasizes that both cooperation and egocentrism are manifested in all phases of communication, albeit to varying extents. SCA places equal importance on the social and cognitive individual factors in pragmatics. The author claims that while (social) cooperation is an intention-directed practice that is governed by relevance, (individual) egocentrism is an attention-oriented trait dominated by salience. The book serves as a theoretical guide for researchers and students who would like to understand how we need to change first language-based theories to make sense of what happens not only in L1 but also in intercultural and multi-lingual interactions.

This book endeavors to fill the conceptual gap in theorizing about embodied cognition. The theories of mind and cognition which one could generally call "situated" or "embodied cognition" have gained much attention in the recent decades. However, it has been mostly phenomenology (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, etc.), which has served as a philosophical background for their research program. The main goal of this book is to bring the philosophy of classical American pragmatism firmly into play. Although pragmatism has been arguably the first intellectual current which systematically built its theories of knowledge, mind and valuation upon the model of a bodily interaction between an organism and its environment, as the editors and authors argue, it has not been given sufficient attention in the debate and, consequently, its conceptual resources for enriching the embodied mind project are far from being exhausted. In this book, the authors propose concrete subject-areas in which the philosophy of pragmatism can be of help when dealing with particular problems the philosophy of the embodied mind nowadays faces - a prominent example being the inevitable tension between bodily situatedness and the potential universality of symbolic meaning.

Cognitive pragmatics is a mature field of research, characterized by robust theories and a growing amount of experimental work. In particular, Relevance Theory has provided a rich framework for research in the field. However, this theory makes a number of assumptions that are rooted in a modular view of cognition. This book provides a detailed analysis of such assumptions, arguing for an alternative model which has, however, some support in ideas explored by relevance theorists. First of all, inferences are explained in terms of associative pattern completion within associative networks, based on the schematic organization of memory. This explanation is shown to apply to a number of cognitive domains besides pragmatics, including mindreading. Moreover, such a view is compatible with a general understanding of the neurocomputational machinery of our cortex, suggesting a general argument to the effect that modularity in its standard version cannot be right. Second, the book argues for a crucial role of conscious attention in pragmatics as well as in most cognitive processes. In the end, what is proposed is not only a revision of Relevance Theory but also a fresh analysis of reasoning, which vindicates some Gricean intuitions.

In Cognitive Pragmatism, Nicholas Rescher tackles the major questions of philosophical inquiry, pondering the nature of truth and existence. In the authoritative voice and calculated manner that we've come to expect from this distinguished philosopher, Rescher argues that the development of knowledge is a practice, pursued by humans because we have a need for its products. This pragmatic approach satisfies our innate urge as humans to make sense of our surroundings.Taking his discussion down to the level of particular details, and addressing such topics as inductive validation, hypostatization fallacies, and counterfactual reasoning, Rescher abandons abstract generalities in favor of concrete specifics. For example, philosophers usually insist that to reason logically from a counterfactual, we must imagine a possible world in which the statement is fact. But Rescher argues that there's no need to attempt to accept the facts of a world outside our cognition in order to reason from them. He shows us how we can use our own natural system of prioritizing, our own understanding of the fundamental, to resolve the inconsistencies in such statements as, "If the Eiffel Tower were in Manhattan, then it would be in New York State." In using dozens of real-world examples such as these, and in arguing in his characteristically succinct style, Rescher casts light on a wide variety of concrete issues in the classical theory of knowledge, and reassures us along the way that the inherent limitations on our knowledge are no cause for distress. In pragmatic theory and inquiry, we must accept that the best we can do is good enough, because we only have a certain (albeit large) set of tools and conceptualizations available to us.A unique synthesis, this endeavor into pragmatic epistemology will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy and cognitive science.

This book is a necessary supplement to the theoretical exploration into semantic rhetoric, particularly a breakthrough in the study of the relationship between the source domain and target domain involved in the construction of semantic rhetorical discourse. The study focuses on rhetorical expressions constructed by means of semantic variation or deviation of concepts. Based on the holistic cognitive pragmatic model and the framework of impartment and inheritance of connotation and denotation, this book constructs a new framework, the Annotation-Denotation Relevance-Inheritance Model (ADRIM) to explain the construing of semantic rhetoric. Besides, rooted in the Index Hypothesis Theory and the research paradigm of affordance derivation in language comprehension, three ERP experiments on metaphor, irony, and pun, are conducted to demonstrate the psychological reality that people activate possible feature extraction in the process of understanding semantic rhetoric. With those sample analyses and experiments, the feasibility and operability of ADRIM are proved. The book unfolds a combined approach of speculative research and empirical research, and can provide a new methodological alternative for semantic rhetorical studies in different languages. This title will be an essential read to students and scholars of Linguistics, East Asian Studies, and social workers who are interested in Language Studies in general.

Speakers tend to compose their utterances in such a way that the message they want to get across is hardly ever fully encoded by the meanings of the words and the grammar they use. Instead speakers rely on hearers adding conceptual and emotive content while interpreting the contextually appropriate meanings and intentions behind utterances. This insight, which is of course particularly relevant in all kinds of indirect, figurative or humorous talk, lies at the heart of the linguistic discipline of pragmatics. If pragmatics is the study of meaning-in-context, then cognitive pragmatics can be broadly defined as encompassing the study of the cognitive principles and processes involved in the construal of meaning-in-context. While it would seem only natural that pragmatics as such should have addressed such cognitive issues anyway, it has mainly been due to the historical rooting of this discipline in the philosophy of language that psychological aspects have not been in the pragmatic limelight to date. Being part of the 9-volume-series Handbooks of Pragmatics, this volume is the first to systematically survey this terrain from a wide range of perspectives. It collects state-of-the-art contributions by leading experts from the fields of pragmatics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, clinical linguistics and historical linguistics. The volume is divided into four parts which tackle the following questions: Part I: The cognitive principles of pragmatic competence What are the general cognitive principles underlying pragmatic competence, i.e. the skill to arrive at context-dependent meanings of utterances? What are the cognitive underpinnings of language users' ability to compute or infer intended meanings in the role of hearers and to give hints as to how to decode intended meanings in the role of speakers? Part II: The psychology of pragmatics What are the actual cognitive processes taking place during online construal of meaning-in-context on the basis of encoded messages? How is pragmatic competence acquired in childhood? What are the types, sources and effects of pragmatic disorders, i.e. impairments of pragmatic competence? Part III: The construal of non-explicit and non-literal meaning-in-context What are the cognitive principles and processes involved in the construal of meanings of non-explicit and indirect utterances? How do we process figurative meanings, humour and gestures? Part IV: The emergence of linguistic structures from meaning-in-context What are the repercussions of the (repeated) construal of context-dependent meanings on linguistic structures and the linguistic system? How does the system change under the influence of the construal of meanings in social situations? Reduced series price (print) available! degruyter@de.rhenus.com.