Context and Cognition: Knowledge Frames and Speech Act Comprehension * Teun

This paper is about the cognitive foundations of pragmatic theories. Besides the fact that the usual appropriateness conditions for speech acts, which are given in cognitive terms, such as S knows/believes/wants ... (that) p , require empirical investigation, a sound theory of pragmatics must also explain how certain utterances in certain contexts are actually understood as certain speech acts. Speech act comprehension is based on rules and strategies for so-called context analysis , in which (epistemic) frames play an important role in the analysis of social context, social frames, and interaction type. Results of context analysis are then matched with those of pragmatic sentence analysis, viz. the illocutionary act indicating devices. Finally, some results from the cognitive analysis of discourse processing are applied in a brief account of the comprehension of speech act sequences and macro-speech acts.