Experimental Pragmatics: The Making of a Cognitive Science (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781107446885)

How does a listener understand a sarcastic 'That was a wonderful speech' when the words point to a positive review? Why do students of introductory logic interpret 'Some cabs are yellow' as 'Not all cabs are yellow' when the meaning of 'some' is compatible with 'all'? Pragmatics aims to explain how listeners draw out a speaker's meaning from utterances, an astonishing feat when one considers that the words in a sentence hardly suffice for fully comprehending what the speaker intended. Given the nature of pragmatics, it is going to take the interdisciplinary firepower of many cognitive sciences - including philosophy, experimental psychology, linguistics and neuroscience - to fully appreciate this uniquely human ability. In this book, Ira Noveck, a leading pioneer in experimental pragmatics, engagingly walks the reader through the phenomena, the theoretical debates, the experiments as well as the historical development of this growing academic discipline.

Author: Ira Noveck
ISBN-10: 1107446880
ISBN-13: 9781107446885
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 03/11/2021
Pages: 280
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.84lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.59d