Conditionality in individual minds: an argument for a wholly pragmatic approach to utterance interpretation

• Magdalena Sztencel ^[1]
  1. [1] Newcastle University

     Newcastle University

     Reino Unido

     
• Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 152, 2014, págs. 81-97
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • There is a growing body of research which undermines the traditional dual-processing model of utterance interpretation, whereby pragmatic inference is preceded by the context-independent process of linguistic decoding. This body of research suggests that utterance interpretation is a wholly pragmatic inferential process. In this paper, I seek to defend a wholly pragmatic approach by investigating the role of the purported process of context-independent decoding and the process of pragmatic inference in determining when a conditional is false. I show that material conditionality, like all kinds of conditionality, lies in pragmatically derived holistic thought, i.e. not in any putative linguistic semantics.