Experimental Pragmatics: The Making of a Cognitive Science (Key Topics in Semantics and Pragmatics) - Hardcover

Noveck, Ira

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1107084903 ISBN 13: 9781107084902

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2018

Synopsis

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 a listener draws out a speaker's meaning from an utterance, 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.

About this title

Book Description

How do listeners understand what they are told? How do they make sense of ambiguities, understand irony, and - more generally - capture a speaker's intended meaning? Using interactions between philosophy, experimental psychology, linguistics and neuroscience to craft innovative experiments, this book explains the phenomena of human communication.

About the Author

Ira Noveck is a Senior Scientist at the Institut des Sciences Cognitives-Marc Jeannerod in Lyon, an independent research center that operates under the auspices of the CNRS (Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), where he has been working since 1999.  He is co-editor (with Dan Sperber) of the first volume on Experimental Pragmatics (2004), is responsible for creating a European research network of experimental pragmatists (called Euro-xprag), and consults with regional networks, such as xprag.de and xprag.it. For more information, visit sites.google.com/site/iranoveck/home.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1107084903
• ISBN 13: 9781107084902
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 274