Linguistics \ Pragmatics \ Cognitive Pragmatics
Cognitive Pragmatics is a subfield of pragmatics in linguistics that explores how human cognitive processes influence and control the use and understanding of language in context. While traditional pragmatics primarily focuses on the contextual aspects of meaning—such as speech acts, implicature, and conversation analysis—cognitive pragmatics dives deeper into the mental mechanisms that enable humans to interpret and produce language in real-time communication.
At the heart of cognitive pragmatics is the study of mental representations and processes involved in communication. This includes examining how individuals use background knowledge, intentions, beliefs, and mental states to comprehend and predict the communicative intentions of others. Cognitive pragmatics often draws upon theories from cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience to explain these phenomena.
Key concepts in cognitive pragmatics include:
1. Theory of Mind (ToM): This refers to the ability to attribute mental states—such as beliefs, intents, desires, and knowledge—to oneself and to others. ToM is crucial for understanding indirect speech acts, irony, sarcasm, and other forms of non-literal language.
Relevance Theory: Proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, this theory posits that human communication is guided by the principle of relevance, meaning that listeners assume a speaker’s utterance will be the most relevant piece of information given the context. Relevance is determined by the trade-off between cognitive effort and cognitive effect.
Common Ground: This refers to the shared knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions between communicators. Cognitive pragmatics investigates how individuals build, maintain, and use common ground to facilitate smooth and effective communication.
Inferencing: This involves the cognitive processes used to fill in gaps that the literal meaning of words may leave, such as recognizing presuppositions or deriving implicatures. For example, in the utterance “Can you pass the salt?” cognitive pragmatics looks at how listeners interpret this as a request rather than a question about their ability.
Mathematical models are sometimes used in cognitive pragmatics to formalize aspects of communication. For instance, Bayesian inference can be applied to model how listeners update their beliefs based on new information provided by the speaker. This approach can be summarized by Bayes’ Theorem:
\[ P(H|E) = \frac{P(E|H)P(H)}{P(E)} \]
where:
- \( P(H|E) \) is the posterior probability of the hypothesis \( H \) given the evidence \( E \),
- \( P(E|H) \) is the likelihood of observing the evidence \( E \) given the hypothesis \( H \),
- \( P(H) \) is the prior probability of the hypothesis before observing the evidence,
- \( P(E) \) is the probability of the evidence under all possible hypotheses.
The integration of interdisciplinary perspectives and methodologies makes cognitive pragmatics a dynamic and evolving field, offering deeper insights into the cognitive underpinnings of human communication. Understanding cognitive pragmatics is essential for advancing our knowledge of language processing, developing artificial intelligence systems capable of natural language understanding, and improving communication in social and educational settings.