The modular approach to language in its career of 30 years had alternating and rivaling views regarding the place pragmatics. A first basically is one outlined by Fodor (1983) that would pack pragmatic aspects use under rubric mushy General Problem Solver component architecture, thus extracting it from considerations modularity altogether. rival Massive Modular approaches such as Dan Sperber’s ...

The term "pragmatics" is often used to refer without distinction, on one hand, to the contextual selection of interpretation norms and, on the other hand, to the context-sensitive processes guided by these norms. Pragmatics in the first acception depends on language-independent contextual factors that can, but need not, involve Theory of Mind; in the second acception, pragmatics is a language-s...

This book makes the case that the relatively new field of pragmatics has an inherently multidisciplinary nature, with strong relationships with other fields of study including, among others, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence and language pathology. Cummings argues convincingly that the study of pragmatics should be influenced by, and has much to off...

We propose a program of research which has as its goal establishing a framework and methodology for investigating the pragmatic aspects of the translation process and implementing a computational platform for carrying out systematic experiments on the pragmatics of translation. The program has four components. First, on the basis of a comparative study of multiple translations of the same docum...

Language is coordination. Pursuing this, the present Special Issue of Pragmatics & Cognition challenges two widely held positions. First, the papers reject the claim that language is essentially ‘symbolic’. Second, they deny that minds (or brains) represent verbal patterns. Rather, language is social, individual, and contributes the feeling of thinking. Simply, it is distributed. Elucidating th...

It is hardly contestable that in interpreting the speaker’s utterance the addressee is frequently driven by the salience of some of the possible interpretations. This salience can be caused by a greater frequency of a certain meaning or by its simplicity, but ultimately it boils down to the knowledge of social and cultural conventions or to some cognitive principles that govern our thinking. De...

It is axiomatic in the study of pragmatics that speakers must make choices from a myriad of variants in phonology, morphology and syntax ‘‘on the fly’’ during the course of interaction. However, the specific psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms that both prompt these choices have largely been taken for granted. Theoretical approaches to this problem in the past have focused on lingui...

What approach is applied in teaching English single-sex education (SSE) and Islamic boarding schools particular? Some studies report that the language proficiency of Boarding School students remains unimproved. Although it apparent SSE makes teachers apply instructional strategies more readily effectively than mixed-sex groupings, suitability approaches or methods by Schools unanswered. The ord...