{"id":1798,"date":"2011-10-02T10:00:24","date_gmt":"2011-10-02T08:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1798"},"modified":"2011-09-19T09:31:46","modified_gmt":"2011-09-19T07:31:46","slug":"cognition-and-pragmatics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1798","title":{"rendered":"Cognition and pragmatics"},"content":{"rendered":"
Cognition and pragmatics. <\/strong>Ed. by Dominiek Sandra<\/strong>, Jan-Ola \u00d6stman<\/strong>, <\/strong>and Jef Verschueren<\/strong>. (Handbook of pragmatics highlights 3.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. Pp. xvii, 399. ISBN 9789027207807<\/a>. $ 59.<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Anish Koshy<\/a><\/strong>, The English and Foreign Languages University<\/em><\/p>\n

Cognition and pragmatics<\/em> has fifteen articles concerning various aspects of the cognitive processes underlying language use. All the articles deal with current methodologies and debates in the field and summarize latest research findings, while keeping the importance of pragmatics foregrounded.<\/p>\n

In the introductoryarticle, Dominiek Sandra discusses paradigm shifts in linguistic investigation and gives an overview of the body of the volume.<\/p>\n

Three articles provide necessary background to the field of cognitive science. For Ronald W. Langacker<\/strong> grammar is fully reducible to assemblies of symbolic structures organized in terms of schemas and usage events, for instance. Seana Coulson<\/strong> and Teenie Matlock <\/strong>provide a brief history of cognitive science studies, highlighting the contribution of multiple disciplines and multiple approaches to the field. Dominiek Sandra <\/strong>discusses important aspects of experimentation and statistical tests like the chi-square test and analysis of variance (ANOVA).<\/p>\n

Two articles deal with developmental issues. Susan M. Ervin-Tripp <\/strong>sees the developmental process as orderly, universal, and predictable and discusses constructivism and the critical period. Steven Gillis<\/strong> and Dorit Ravid<\/strong> examine language acquisition via innateness, connectionism, and bootstrapping.<\/p>\n

Seven articles address various issues of the relationship between language and cognition. Dominiek Sandra <\/strong>traces the establishment of psycholinguistics as a research discipline and discusses connectionism, corpus research, and simulation-studies. Discussing the word recognition system underlying the cognitive processing of multilingual individuals, Ton Dijkstra<\/strong> investigates the possibility of an integrated lexicon. Exploring the relationship between comprehension and production, J. Cooper Cutting <\/strong>looks at the evidence for an associated or dissociated system from various studies.<\/p>\n

Roger Lindsay <\/strong>investigates the relationship between perception and language in terms of constraints and neuropsychological evidence and discusses linguistic relativity and determinism. Eleanor Rosch <\/strong>explores categorization studies through the classical phase and prototype theories, challenges against them, and the idea of categories as theories. Awareness, intentionality, and role-plays form part of Elizabeth Mertz <\/strong>and Jonathan Yovel<\/strong>\u2019s discussion on the conceptualization of metalanguage and its constitutive and creative functions. Wallace Chafe <\/strong>explores the debate on language as a conscious versus unconscious activity, asserting that consciousness shapes language pervasively even if largely unconsciously.<\/p>\n

Three articles address modern techniques used for modeling human cognition\/language processing. Ton Weijters <\/strong>and Antal van den Bosch<\/strong> focus on the role of connectionist models like back-propagation and distributed script processing and episodic memory network (DISCERN) in natural language processing and pragmatics. Discussing the representation and manipulation of concepts and the encoding of background knowledge, Steven Gillis, Walter Daelemans<\/strong>, and Koenraad DeSmedt <\/strong>introduce artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. Michel Paradis<\/strong> discusses cerebral division of labor in verbal communication through investigations of brain-damaged individuals and data from neuroimaging.<\/p>\n

There is a sincere attempt made to showcase the crucial relationship between pragmatics and cognitive investigations. That every article begins with basic definitions and ends with the state of the art benefits both a newcomer and an advanced researcher.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cognition and pragmatics. Ed. by Dominiek Sandra, Jan-Ola \u00d6stman, and Jef Verschueren. (Handbook of pragmatics highlights 3.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. Pp. xvii, 399. ISBN 9789027207807. $ 59. Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The English and Foreign Languages University Cognition and pragmatics has fifteen articles concerning various aspects of the cognitive processes underlying language use. All […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1798"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1799,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798\/revisions\/1799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}