Abstract
Abstract
Language does not happen in a social vacuum. This idea lies at the origins of pragmatics forged by Austin and Searle's classical answers to how verbal communication is achieved. Language does not occur in a cognitive vacuum either. Thanks largely to the influential work of Paul Grice, modern pragmatics has recognized that verbal and nonverbal communication is an inferential activity involving the expression and recognition of
intentions
. These two factors—the social and the cognitive inherent in online processing—are reflected in natural behaviors and in speech coupled with gestures, voice, attitudes, desires, as well as emotions conveyed.
In principle, the aim of pragmatic theory is to explain how
utterances
—with all their linguistic and nonlinguistic properties—are understood. The advent of cognitive pragmatics in the early 1980s brought a different orientation: “pragmatics” is a capacity of the mind which interacts with the utterance comprehension system to show, or recognize, someone's intention to inform. But in the process of utterance interpretation, speakers show us more about their beliefs, desires, and intentions to convey their happiness, distress, anger, or fear, than the words they have used.