Ran Yongping
Pragmatics is in a constant state of flux and evolution, there have appeared different perspectives or approaches to pragmatics, such as Dascal (1983) analyzes the field from the standpoint of the philosophy of language, Green (1989/1996) lays particular emphasis on textual pragmatics and more formal aspects of pragmatics, Mey (1993) regards pragmatics the societally necessary and consciously interactive dimension of the study of language, Thomas (1995) argues convincingly for a social, psychological and cognitive approach to pragmatics, Verschueren (1999) lays his emphasis on a general cognitive, social and cultural perspective on language use, while Blakemore (1992) and Sperber & Wilson (1986/1995) take a cognitive approach. On the basis of the above, pragmatics becomes more likely to be considered cognitively involved, although there still exists disagreements on what cognitive pragmatics is and what core issues should be addressed, and the like. Anyhow it is held in the study that cognitive pragmatics focuses on the mental processing of information for communicative purposes and on the interlocutors' abilities in terms of which they create and understand meanings beyond the word and sentence levels.
In the present study its attention has been concentrated upon the following aspects, which are considered essential in cognitive pragmatics: the cognitive basis of pragmatics, pragmatic modularity, understanding and inference, and the interrelatedness between cognitive and social factors. Firstly, it traces the cognitive basis back to the semiotic study in the 1930s following the evolution of pragmatics, since the cognitive-pragmatic perspective originates in the philosophy of language (Marmaridou 2000). And the relationship between pragmatics and some cognitive disciplines is explored so as to account for the fact that it is of necessity to do pragmatics from the cognitive perspective, and by looking into the essence of the effects of signs, effects of speech acts, and cognitive effects, we can find some congruity among them. The focus is then put on the discussion of modularity and pragmatic module. The notion of module has been influentially explicated in Fodor (1983), in which input systems are claimed to be modular since they possess certain properties. Whether a pragmatic system is modular arises as a focus in the late discussion. Since pragmatics is not the extension of grammar, it is unlikely that there exists a pragmatic code and pragmatics is not a single module either. Thirdly, understanding and inference are analyzed in detail. In understanding utterances the hearer looks not just for an arbitrary interpretation but for the one intended by the speaker, how processing effort is cost for achieving cognitive effects, in line with communicative purposes, is concentrated in the discussion, in which relevance theory is referred to for the account of inferential understanding. Fourthly, how to reconcile the social factors
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