engleski

Linguistic interpretation and cognition

This paper shows that the different treatments of inference in Cognitive Linguistics and Relevance Theory are by no means incompatible. The two frameworks work under the assumption that language use is an essentially interpretive enterprise, i.e. they reject the view that linguistic processing is a matter of decoding previously coded meaning. However, the relevance-theoretic explanatory apparatus places excessive emphasis on the pragmatic control of inferential activity to the detriment of a thorough understanding of the cognitive processes involved in deriving meaning effects. Cognitive Linguistics offers an outstanding framework for such an analysis, but ignores the way the communicative impact of cognitive processes is regulated. The relevance criteria of processing economy and contextual effects supply us with the necessary ingredients to sort out this weakness of standard Cognitive Linguistics accounts. Within this context of symbiosis, which requires some adjustments in the two frameworks, we have been able to explore an array of possible cognitive operations such as parametrization, correlation, comparison, expansion, reduction, strengthening, mitigation and (counterfactual) conditioning. Metonymic expansion and reduction operations allow us to determine, with greater accuracy than has so far been attained in Relevance Theory, the connections between implicature and explicature derivation. The discussion sheds light on concepts and proposals traditionally accepted in the two theoretical approaches in question. We reexamine the relevance-theoretic notions of broadening and narrowing in the context of ad hoc concept construction. We argue that these two concepts evince explanatory weaknesses and substituted the list of cognitive operations referred to above. In this connection, we revise the standard approach to metaphor and metonymy in Cognitive Linguistics with a view to making it sensitive to the requirements of a communicative theory of language where each metaphoric and metonymic type is recognized by its differentiated ability to create its own kind of meaning effects.

inference; cognitive operations; Relevance Theory; Cognitive

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