Automatic and controlled processes in pragmatics

In utterance understanding, both personal and sub-personal aspects appear to be involved. Relevance theory (starting from Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995) and Recanati (2004) have respectively explored two alternative ways to conceive of those aspects and their interaction. Here a third account is proposed, in the light of the automatic-controlled distinction in psychology, and of recent views concerning the cooperation between these two modes of processing. Compared to Recanati (2004), the account proposed here assigns a larger role to automatic, associative processes; at the same time, it rejects the view that consciousness applies only to what Recanati calls secondary pragmatic processes. Consciousness is rather held to cooperate with associative processes in any aspect of pragmatic processing, irrespective of the pragmatic distinction between explicatures and implicatures. On the other hand, a close consideration of how associative and conscious processes plausibly interact makes it appear unnecessary the hypothesis of a specialized process for utterance understanding—such as the automatic, inferential mechanism put forth by Relevance theory.