Automatic and Controlled Processes in Pragmatics
In utterance understanding, both personal and sub-personal aspects appear to be involved. Relevance theory (starting from Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995 ) and Recanati (2004 ) have respectively explored two alternative ways to conceive of those aspects and
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Abstract In utterance understanding, both personal and sub-personal aspects appear to be involved. Relevance theory (starting from Sperber and Wilson 1986/ 1995) and Recanati (2004) have respectively explored two alternative ways to conceive of those aspects and their interaction. Here a third account is proposed, in the light of the automatic-controlled distinction in psychology, and of recent views concerning the cooperation between these two modes of processing. Compared to Recanati (2004), the account proposed here assigns a larger role to automatic, associative processes; at the same time, it rejects the view that consciousness applies only to what Recanati calls secondary pragmatic processes. Consciousness is rather held to cooperate with associative processes in any aspect of pragmatic processing, irrespective of the pragmatic distinction between explicatures and implicatures. On the other hand, a close consideration of how associative and conscious processes plausibly interact makes it appear unnecessary the hypothesis of a specialized process for utterance understanding—such as the automatic, inferential mechanism put forth by Relevance theory.
Keywords Pragmatics Automatic process Consciousness Working memory
Controlled process
Schema
I would like to thank Gina Kuperberg, whose lectures in Catania have opened new perspectives for my research on automatic and controlled processes, and Robyn Carston, whose incisive comments to a talk I gave in Leipzig helped me to acknowledge how crucial it was to address the issue at the core of this paper. M. Mazzone (&) University of Catania, Catania, Italy e-mail: [email protected]
A. Capone et al. (eds.), Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 2, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-01014-4_18, Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013
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1 Introduction Pragmatic processing seems to be at the same time an automatic and a personallevel affair. Humans produce and understand utterances in context quite rapidly and effortlessly, just as it is expected to occur in automatic processing; nonetheless, verbal communication is thought to require an intentional involvement on the part of the speaker, and a recognition of this speaker’s intention—possibly requiring rational capacities—on the part of the addressee. However, it is far from immediately clear how pragmatic theory should account for the coexistence of the two different features considered above; this is probably one of the major challenges that current cognitive pragmatics has to cope with. There are two main explicit attempts to address that issue within pragmatic theories of language understanding: one is Relevance theory, the other is Recanati’s (2004) framework.1 The latter solve the problem by proposing a two-level model, where automatic associative processes and personal-level, inferential processes cooperate in explaining language comprehension in context. Relevance theorists assume instead that, in a sense, a single mechan
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