Introduction : special issue on cognitive pragmatics and its interfaces in linguistics

Abstract

A significant landmark in the evolution of pragmatics theorising can be located in insistence of relevance theorists that pragmatics is pursued from a cognitive perspective, within which a realistic view of human cognition is both criterial for good pragmatic theory and an overall aim of pragmatic analysis. Because of this, current discussions in the domain, while still quite philosophical in nature, are increasingly affected by research in cognitive psychology and regularly meet with the requirement that they put forth psychologically plausible theoretical predictions. In this respect, contemporary accounts of pragmatics are comparable to the cognitive/mentalist approaches preferred for the investigation of other subfields of linguistics and should therefore logically fit together with them. Even so, there is still a lot of scepticism on whether pragmatics can be usefully implemented in our theoretical description of what knowledge of language ultimately consists in, since inferences regarding speaker-intentions have been customarily assumed to lie outside the domain of language proper.