engleski

Content and formal cognitive operations in construing meaning

Relevance theorists have correctly observed that pragmatic inference not only operates at the level of implicature-derivation, but is also a relevant phenomenon at the level of explicitness. The present paper has shown that pragmatic inference is even more pervasive than commonly assumed. The authors have identified a number of low-level or content cognitive operations, not found in the canonical relevance-theoretic literature, that seem to play a significant role in communicating explicit assumptions, i.e. those assumptions which arise as adaptations of utterances to the context. Other operations work on a higher level and have a formal nature. Such operations are a prerequisite for content operations to take place. Underlying this account of linguistic processing is the radical assumption - consonant with current thinking in Cognitive Linguistics - that there is no such thing as coded meaning, but rather the formal aspects of utterances prompt the hearer to call upon different mental spaces which interrelate on the basis of formal and content cognitive operations. Our discussion of formal operations has allowed us to formulate the Correlation Principle, which constrains the number of relevant correlations between input mental spaces in integration and projection tasks. It has further allowed us to account for consistency between input spaces in terms of a refined version of the Extended Invariance Principle, as formulated in Ruiz de Mendoza (1998). Finally, we have addressed the question of the place of the implicature-explicature distinction within our own version of conceptual integration which replaces Turner & Fauconnier's account in Cognitive Linguistics.

cognition; pragmatics; metaphor; metonymy; inference; Invariance Hypothesis

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