(DOWNLOAD) "Discourse and Pragmatics. A Cognitive Perspective" by Revista Espanola de Linguistica Aplicada * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Discourse and Pragmatics. A Cognitive Perspective
- Author : Revista Espanola de Linguistica Aplicada
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 85 KB
Description
1. INTRODUCTION This paper is concerned with the connections between semantics, pragmatics, and discourse (1). The underlying assumption for this enterprise is the belief that an explanatorily adequate account of discourse processes cannot be independent of semantics and pragmatics. The paper adopts a maximalist view of semantics in which the meaning of sentences is seen as a result of complex patterns of interaction between different cognitive models. These include propositional models, metaphor, metonymy, and image-schemas, as originally propounded by Lakoff (1987). The maximalist approach to semantics is combined with a broad view of inferential pragmatics according to which meaning derivation is regulated by the presumption of optimal relevance, i.e. the speaker's presumed desire to achieve the maximum number of meaning effects for the least processing effort. This view has been amply argued for by scholars working within Sperber and Wilson's (1995) Relevance Theory, among them Carston (1997, 2002; cf. also Wilson and Carston 2007) in the domain of pragmatically guided concept construction and Blakemore (1992, 2002) in discourse. Cognitive model theory attempts to capture all the richness of semantic characterisations. This endows the theory with a huge potential to account for inferential activity and the ability of people to create conceptually connected texts. Inferential pragmatics contains all the criteria necessary to explain how semantic descriptions are used strategically to create text. Text is the result of adequate balancing explicit and implicit information on the basis of relevance. This is done through what -following Otal and Ruiz de Mendoza (2007) and Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal (2008)- we may call cued inferencing, i.e. making inferences on the basis of prompts provided by linguistic expressions (usually underspecified semantic representations) in connection to a context.