What is it about?
This paper reveals the problems in neo-Gricean principles and relevance theory. The author argues that they are too information-biased, and neglect the social and cultural factors in communication. And the author spells out the detailed ingredients of context: first divided into linguistic and situational, then the situational is again divided into objective (time, place and topic of conversation) and subjective (participants), and the subjective is further divided into intention, knowledge, interest, emotion, identity, and even the more durable traits of age, class, ethnicity, gender, and etc of participants. By taking all these factors into consideration, the author believes we will be able to arrive at better interpretations of utterances.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
What is unique in this paper is that there is a detailed proposal about integrating the cognitive and the soico-cultural approaches in pragmatics.
Perspectives
This paper covers all the important theories in pragmatics, giving each a fair evaluation, and culminating at a new proposal by the author, which accounts for pragmatic inference in a better way.
Wangqi Jiang
Peking University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A socio-cognitive approach to pragmatic inference, Intercultural Pragmatics, January 2017, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/ip-2017-0017.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
