Sandra D., Östman J.-O., Verschueren J. (eds.) Cognition and Pragmatics

Amsterdam. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2009. — 419 p.The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While other volumes select philosophical, grammatical, social, variational, interactional, or discursive angles, this third volume focuses on the interface between language and cognition. Language use is impossible without the mobilization of a large variety of cognitive processes, each serving a different purpose. During the last half century cognitive approaches to language have been particularly successful, and the broad spectrum of contributions to this volume testify to this success. As cognitive approaches to language are by definition a subset of the larger enterprise of cognitive science, a contribution on this general topic sets the stage. This is joined by a chapter on cognitive grammar, a theoretical study of the architecture of human language that is deeply inspired by general cognitive principles. A chapter on experimentation offers a crash-course on basic issues of experimental design and on the rationale behind statistical testing in general and the most important statistical tests in particular, offering a methodological toolkit for understanding many of the other contributions.
Different chapters cover a broad range of topics: language acquisition, psycholinguistics, specialized topics within the latter field (e.g. the bilingual mental lexicon, categorization), and aspects of language awareness. Some chapters home in on what have become indispensible perspectives on the cognitive underpinnings of language: the way language is represented and processed in the human brain and simulation studies. The ever-growing success of the latter type of studies is exemplified, for instance, by the highly flourishing connectionist tradition and the more general paradigm of artificial intelligence, each of which is dealt with in a separate contribution.Perspectives on language and cognition: From empiricism to rationalism and back again
Dominiek Sandra
Language and cognition: Defining aspects of human nature
Language without mind: Structuralism and behaviorism
Language and mind: The mentalist era
Language and cognition: A twin pairArtificial intelligence
Steven Gillis, Walter Daelemans & Koenraad DeSmedtA brief historical note
The physical symbol system hypothesis
Paradigms for the representation of knowledge
Linguistic symbol manipulation in semantics and pragmaticsEleanor Rosch
The classical view of categorization
Challenges and alternatives to the classical view
Modeling problems and critiques of graded structure
Categories as theoriesCerebral division of labour in verbal communication 53
Michel ParadisDyshyponoia
Right-hemisphere involvement
Implicit pragmatic competence and metapragmatic knowledge
Inference
The legitimacy of sentence grammars
Semantics and pragmatics in the interpretation of an utterance
Language vs. verbal communication: What’s in a name?Ronald W. LangackerOrganization
Conceptualist semantics
Grammar as symbolizationCognitive science
Seana Coulson & Teenie Matlock
Definition
History of contributing fields
Methods
Issues
Cognitive science and pragmaticsComprehension vs. production
J. Cooper CuttingThe structure of the lexicon
Building syntax
The speaker as a listenerTon Weijters & Antal van denBoschConnectionist modeling
Connectionist modeling and pragmaticsConsciousness and language
Wallace Chafe
Properties of consciousness
Foci of consciousness
Activation cost
Discourse topics
Immediacy and displacementDevelopmental psychology 146
Susan M. Ervin-Tripp
Historical overview
The concept of development
Major research issues
Points of view on development
Methods of study
Pragmatic perspectives on development
Some relations of pragmatics to developmental issues
Collaborative research potentialExperimentation
Dominiek Sandra
Theoretical approaches to science
Empirical approaches to science
ExperimentationLanguage acquisition
Steven Gillis & Dorit RavidCentral issues and main controversies
Methodologies
Early language development: A quantitative description
Early language development: A qualitative description
Later language developmentMetalinguistic awareness
Elizabeth Mertz & Jonathan YovelConceptualizing metalanguage
Metalanguage, metalinguistic activity, and metalinguistic awareness
Linguistic/empirical studies of metalinguistic structure, activity, and awareness
Linguistic ideology
Awareness and intentionality: Cognitive and developmental approaches to metalinguistic activity
Conclusion: Metalinguistic creativity, awareness, and the social structuring of communicationPerception and language
Roger Lindsay
Overview and introduction
Relativity and determinism
Structural constraints upon cognitionPsycholinguistics
Dominiek Sandra
The birth, adolescence, and adulthood of psycholinguistics
Major goals
Major theoretical modelsâ
Major methodologies
Major research techniquesâ
Studies on language perception
Spoken language processingâThe multilingual lexicon
Ton Dijkstra