Pragmatics & Cognition - Volume 9, Issue 2, 2001

This paper undertakes to begin to perform the overdue task of de-objectivizing the key pragmatic notion of ‘context’. This notion will be re-interpreted in terms of mental models, which correspond to that portion of ‘reality’ that is relevant for information processing. For this purpose, a variety of examples of the role of ‘context’ in pragmatics will be re-interpreted in terms of notions and findings of neuro-cognitive psychology.

Meditative poetry has the ability to reproduce aspects of the meditative experience. In this paper we explore this ability, trying to clarify the phenomenon by pointing out the cognitive processes involved. We focus on Christian Jesuit meditation and pinpoint one of its most effective elements: “the composition of place”. We argue that three main abilities associated with “the composition of place” are responsible for the meditative quality detected in poetic meditative texts: The text’s ability to evoke an orientation process; the text’s ability to support diffuse perception and encourage divergent ways of processing; the text’s ability to generate the mental set required for this experience, the absence of purpose, and to supply the conditions that enable such a mental set to exist over time. We illustrate our theoretical discussion through a close reading of two meditative poetic masterpieces: Donne’s Holy Sonnet No. 7, and the Spanish anonymous sonnet “A Cristo Crucificado”.

Writing bears an uncertain relation to speech. Either it is treated as a largely autonomous medium of communication or it is treated as a simple adjunct, cipher, image or record of speech. This paper offers a compromise arguing that writing exploits a special and distinctive property of speech, namely, that of quotation. Quotation suspends the contextual, deictic, and illocutionary features of ordinary speech to create a quasi-autonomous linguistic form to which normal referential and intentional features of speech no longer apply. Written documents, it is argued, are distinctive in possessing just those properties characteristic of quotation. Evidence from studies of the metalinguistic effects of learning to read and write is used to evaluate this hypothesis.

Intentional communication is perceptually based and about attentional objects. Three attention mechanisms are distinguished: scanning, attention attraction, and attention-focusing. Attention-focusing directs the subject towards attentional objects. Attention-focusing is goal-governed (controlled by stimulus) or goal-intended (under the control of the subject). Attentional objects are perceptually categorised functional entities that emerge in the interaction between subjects and environment. Joint attention allows for focusing on the same attentional object simultaneously (mutual object-focused attention), provided that the subjects have focused on each other beforehand (subject-subject attention). It results in intentional communication if the subjects attend to each other as subjects (i) capable of attending, and (ii) attending in a goal-intended way. Intentional communication is fundamentally imperative and adapted to action.

The standard understanding of tautologies is that they are semantically vacuous. Yet tautological utterances occur frequently in conversational discourse. One approach contends that apparent tautological statements are either genuinely tautologous and thereby semantically vacuous or are what we term “pseudo-tautologies”, i.e., sentences that only bear a formal syntactic resemblance to tautologies but are not in fact tautologous. Another approach follows Grice and asserts that the meaning of a tautological utterance derives from an inference made by the listener from the utterance via universal rules of conversation to a non-tautological proposition. We deny both accounts for a subset of tautological utterances that are both content-bearing and truly tautological. Such “deep tautologies” acquire meaning not by shedding their tautological status, but by drawing attention to it. Since only non-vague noun phrases will support tautological statements of the form N is N, the use of a tautology of this form in conversational context will, by its use as a tautology, indicate the speaker’s intention that the noun phrase be considered non-vague.