Language, Action and Thought

Much of experimental research in pragmatics focuses on determining to which extent this or that pragmatic process involves Theory of Mind, with some researchers questioning whether all pragmatics is necessarily rooted in the ability to represent other people’s communicative intentions. Independently of one's favourite model, however, this research paradigm presupposes that pragmatic processes map on a typology of pragmatic outputs, such as implicature, metaphor, indirect speech act or irony. This way of thinking conflates the rational reconstruction of pragmatic processing as an inferential link between two syntactic strings (what is said and the putatively derived meaning) with the actual interpretation process. I will present experimental data that supports the alternative view, according to which pragmatic processes and the contextual resources on which they are based depend on contextual demands and individual characteristics, in a fashion orthogonal to typologies of pragmatic outputs.