Language and Dialogue - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2011

This paper reviews empirical data from monkey neurophysiology and human brain imaging regarding mirror neurons and language. These data are interpreted as suggesting that some of our cognitive intuitions about language and representations may be misleading. For centuries, representations have been conceptualized as secondary, both temporally and spatially, to a primary entity. What if representations have ontological priority? Can we even conceive this idea?

Indeterminacy in language is commonly resorted to for a variety of reasons, in several different forms. After touching on the fuzzy boundaries of indeterminacy with respect to vagueness and ambiguity, several linguistic devices (among which, unexpectedly, also cardinal numbers) are introduced and discussed in relation to the prototypical form of dialogue, the role of context/co-text, and the interactional level. Not surprisingly, ‘interaction’ turns out to be a key word in understanding the widespread recourse to indeterminacy in dialogue, especially in face-to-face situations, which provide interactants with a wide range of contextual components. These are useful for retrieving the overall picture and, in certain cases, making it clear, also thanks to multiple resources that are integrated in the dialogic development and in the process of understanding. Unavoidably, indeterminacy in dialogue, a complex phenomenon, has to be dealt with in an integrated perspective.

We study the accomplishment of the abstract version of Wason’s selection task in a cooperative dialogue context that has been neglected in the research devoted to this task. 123 psychology students, 75 in their third year and 48 in their first year of studies participated in the experiment. 59 students performed the task individually (control group) and 32 in dyads (experimental group) while we recorded their dialogues. In accordance with the literature, the dyads outperform significantly the students working alone. To discover the strategies implemented in the four dyads which succeeded, we analyzed their respective dialogues with a theory (‘Interlocutory Logic’) of the logical form of conversational events as they are manifested phenomenally in natural language. We show that these strategies are situated and emergent products of the dialogue, since no member of the dyads knew them before the interaction. So, it is surely by supporting the emergence of such joint cognition that the interaction is a factor of cognitive progress. We conclude this research by some remarks on the Wason’s task and moreover on the methodological solipsism in the psychology of reasoning.

Now that linguists are beginning to see an element of dialogicality in all language use, there is more scope for a humanized dialogue analysis with ameliorative goals. This can divide its labour between a communicational criticism dealing with the ethics of address, and a mediating criticism dealing with the ethics of response. In the present article, I outline the distinctive features of such an approach, and by sketching a communicational theory of literature (cf. Sell 2000) draw particular attention to the dialogicality arising between literary writers and their audience. From this starting-point, I then examine instances of four different literary genres for the light they can throw on the general ethics of address. Key terms here are “genuine communication”, by which I mean any manner of communication which respects the autonomy of the human other, and “negative capability”, defined by Keats (1954 [1817]: 53) as the capability of “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.

In this paper, I aim to explore the contribution (neo-)Gricean pragmatics, as seen by Mira Ariel, can make to the notion of meaning. In her view, the ‘semantic meaning’ of a sentence, seen as the core unit of grammar, can be computed on the basis of the (rule-based) code of a given natural language, revealing the range of meaning(s) this sentence has in isolation. Pragmatic meaning starts with semantic meaning; it is calculated through ‘inferencing’, involving the contextualisation of this sentence and the application of (universal) reasoning. It makes us understand a sentence. This view comes with problems, e.g. the notion of language as ‘code’, the status of rules, the borderline between grammar and pragmatics, the issues of cognition and of the speaker’s intentions (problems of which Ariel is very much aware). As an alternative, I will suggest an approach that bases the interpretation of text segments on discourse evidence shared by the interpretive community, without recourse to people’s minds.

In this article I critically discuss two state-of-the-art theories of meaning in Cognitive Semantics: Evans’ (2006, 2009) LCCM-Theory and Jackendoff’s (2010a, 2010b) Parallel Architecture. The main focus will be on how these theories define meaning and how they represent it. This will serve as a starting point for the introduction of what I have called ‘meaning-in-use’, i.e. an action-theoretical notion of meaning embedded in language use (Feller 2010). Meaning is here construed as something that speakers do in communication, which is closely related to Weigand’s (cf., e.g., 2000, 2010) view of language as language action.