Pragmatics Research

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.

This volume stresses the importance of a multidisciplinary perspective in deepening knowledge of the interface between semantics and pragmatics. It thoroughly investigates concepts belonging to Neo-Gricean and post-Gricean theories. Theoretical research in pragmatics has challenged the idea of a close relation between literal meaning and the explicitly conveyed proposition, claiming that situational context is responsible for an ongoing process of adjusting and revising what a speaker says. Similarly, recent discoveries from the clinical side have highlighted the importance of extra-linguistic sources and the cognitive context in the syntactic and semantic competence of people with language disorders.

by Emily M Bender (Author), Alex Lascarides (Author), Graeme Hirst (Editor)
Meaning is a fundamental concept in Natural Language Processing (NLP), in the tasks of both Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG).