Twentieth-century attempts to study meaning most often reflect this intuition by assigning to every form its “meaning” independently of context. Quite naturally, we feel that the meanings are in the words and in their combinations.
Consciously, we experience words, word combinations, and the automatic sensation of knowing what they mean. In everyday life, when we use or hear words in a language we know, in a culture we know, meanings form instantly. Conversely, many of the seemingly complicated, irregular, and “illogical” properties of language structures become intelligible when their cognitive underpinnings are discovered. Language, which we do experience consciously through sound, gesture, or writing, is a spectacular but far from transparent window into this backstage cognition of our minds. For the most part, the operations and processes that correspond to those powerful capacities are carried out massively below the level of our consciousness.
Distinctive and powerful cognitive capacities such as analogy, framing, metaphor, schematization, recursion, reference-point organization, and conceptual blending lie at the heart of perception, conception, and action, and suffuse our lives with rich meaning – sometimes unbearably rich meaning. They are not, and we are not, passive interpreters of that world. It is now widely understood that brains and cultures play a major role in constructing the world as we see it. Abduction in Natural Language UnderstandingĪs we start a new century, rich and diverse evidence from the social and cognitive sciences continues to provide an ever sharper conception of the way we humans think. Pragmatic Aspects of Grammatical Constructions Relevance Theory and the Saying/Implicating Distinction Pragmatics and the Philosophy of Language Some Interactions of Pragmatics and Grammar Constraints on Ellipsis and Event Reference
The Pragmatics of Deferred Interpretation Empathy and Direct Discourse Perspectives
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