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 listeners draw out a speaker's meaning from utterances, 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

Review:

'This richly illuminating guide by one of the pioneers of experimental pragmatics offers a unique insider's view of the origins, current state and future prospects of the field. Brilliantly enjoyable, accessible and fair-minded.' Deirdre Wilson, University College London

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 this edition

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