Cognitive Pragmatics

Cognitive pragmatics is the study of the psychological processes involved in human communication in context, especially on the side of comprehension. Paul Grice has laid the foundation for this field by describing comprehension as a form of inference-based intention recognition. This chapter presents Grice’s framework, describes how Sperber and Wilson (Relevance Theory) develops it, defends it against criticisms levelled at both the notions of communicative intention and inferential pragmatic processing. It is also argued that inference-based intention recognition may include conventional patterns’ recognition as a component, which would allow for a theoretical convergence between Grice’s and Austin’s paradigms.