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Electrophysiology and Pragmatic Language Comprehension

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Book cover Experimental Pragmatics

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition ((PSPLC))

Abstract

At the outset of their book Relevance, Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) remind the reader: ‘In writing this book, we have not literally put our thoughts down on paper. What we have put down on paper are little dark marks, a copy of which you are now looking at. As for our thoughts, they remain where they always were, inside our brains.’ With these witty remarks, they note that while we often think and speak as if language were a conduit for thought, this is only a metaphor, and a deceptive one at that. It is deceptive because it implies that language comprehension can be reduced to a decoding process (Reddy, 1979). Another, perhaps more appropriate, metaphor involves a portrait of the language user as a paleontologist who constructs theories about extinct animals based on linguistic fossil input. But regardless of one’s favourite metaphor for the relative import of coded and inferential aspects of language comprehension, recent advances in the study of language suggest that the many-headed beast we call meaning depends importantly on electrical activity in the brains of the speakers and hearers who construct it.

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Authors
  1. Seana Coulson
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institut des Sciences Cognitives, France

    Ira A. Noveck

  2. Institut Jean Nicod, France

    Dan Sperber

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© 2004 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Coulson, S. (2004). Electrophysiology and Pragmatic Language Comprehension. In: Noveck, I.A., Sperber, D. (eds) Experimental Pragmatics. Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524125_9

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