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Automatic and Controlled Processes in Pragmatics

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Book cover Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics

Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology ((PEPRPHPS,volume 2))

Abstract

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.

I would like to thank Gina Kuperberg, whose lectures in Catania have opened new perspectives for my research on automatic and controlled processes, and Robyn Carston, whose incisive comments to a talk I gave in Leipzig helped me to acknowledge how crucial it was to address the issue at the core of this paper.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For sure, there are other pragmatic frameworks that could be worth discussing in this context. However, the two I have chosen are amongst the most complete and explicit attempts to analyze the overall cognitive architecture of pragmatic processing. Elsewhere I extend my analysis to other theories in the field by addressing the topic of default interpretations (Mazzone, 2013a). In particular, in that paper I address the positions of Bach, Levinson, Jaszczolt, and also Capone's (2011a, b) interesting proposal of a largely associative perspective on defaults and modularity in pragmatics.

  2. 2.

    Here and below the page numbers refer to the online version of the paper: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/robyn/Carston-Recanati-22August05%5B2%5D.pdf

  3. 3.

    In Bargh's (1994) own terms, the four parameters are awareness, intentionality, efficiency, and controllability. However, Garrod and Pickering suggest that “non-interruptibility” is a more proper label for what Bargh calls “controllability”. Similarly, Mazzone and Campisi (2013) observe that by the term “intentionality” Bargh properly means that a process is not mandatory.

  4. 4.

    See also Gollwitzer et al. (2009, 605), where they suggest that goals may behave in accordance with simple associative (hebbian) principles: “Under the assumption that goals, too, are represented mentally and become automatically activated by the same [hebbian] principles, goal representations should also be capable of automatic activation through contact with features of the contexts in which those goals have been pursued often and consistently in the past.”.

  5. 5.

    Within this argument, Wilson and Carston essentially identify associations with statistical relationships between lexical items in a corpus. As we are going to argue, there is no ground for that identification: there exist in fact a variety of different associative relationships, most of which concern concepts rather than words.

  6. 6.

    She also proposes another interesting argument we will consider in the next section, since it concerns the role of consciousness.

  7. 7.

    With the possible exception of a very restricted number of innate constraints.

  8. 8.

    The role of conscious attention in pragmatics is further explored in Mazzone, 2013b.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Catania, Catania, Italy

    Marco Mazzone

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  1. Marco Mazzone
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  1. University of Messina/Palermo, Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, Italy

    Alessandro Capone

  2. University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

    Franco Lo Piparo

  3. University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

    Marco Carapezza

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Mazzone, M. (2013). Automatic and Controlled Processes in Pragmatics. In: Capone, A., Lo Piparo, F., Carapezza, M. (eds) Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01014-4_18

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