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Commitment is connected to central linguistic features, such as modality and evidentiality. It has thus been investigated in many branches of the field. Building upon this heterogeneous literature, this book offers a cognitive pragmatic account of the processes involved in utterance interpretation, crucially when the hearer assesses the level of commitment linked to it. This research illustrates that the relevance-theoretic notion of strength can be used to capture the cognitive effects of commitment markers (as I think that X, I am sure that X, etc.). The author's model is based on a novel typology as well as predictions which were experimentally tested. The results show that commitment to an utterance is indeed cognitively determined by the strength of the hearer's corresponding assumptions.
List of contents
Table of contents - Kira Boulat - Enunciation Theory and Linguistic Polyphony - Speech Act Theory-Studies on dialogue and argumentation -Relevance Theory-Commitment in linguistics: a summary -Modelling commitment -Theoretical predictions of the model -Experimental pragmatics and memory tasks -Three experimental studies -General discussion - Conclusion
About the author
Kira Boulat holds a PhD in English linguistics from Fribourg University (Switzerland), which she partly wrote in the experimental laboratory of pragmatics in Cambridge (UK). Her research interests include cognitive and experimental pragmatics, as well as psycholinguistics.
Summary
Commitment is connected to central linguistic features, such as modality and evidentiality. It has thus been investigated in many branches of the field. Building upon this heterogeneous literature, this book offers a cognitive pragmatic account of the processes involved in utterance interpretation, crucially when the hearer assesses the level of commitment linked to it. This research illustrates that the relevance-theoretic notion of strength can be used to capture the cognitive effects of commitment markers (as I think that X, I am sure that X, etc.). The author’s model is based on a novel typology as well as predictions which were experimentally tested. The results show that commitment to an utterance is indeed cognitively determined by the strength of the hearer’s corresponding assumptions.
