The complex category of cooperation in verbal interaction
Abstract
This study lays the theoretical groundwork for a treatment of conversational implicature within the framework of "cognitive linguistics" (a term which is taken to include prototype categorization theory and conceptual metaphor theory, as they apply to natural language). The major impediments to such a treatment of implicature lie in the incompatibility of the basic assumptions of cognitive linguistics with the basic assumptions of existing implicature theory, most notably the existing theories' reliance on truth-conditional semantics and a logical model of cognitive processing to both define and analyze implicature. The strategy adopted here is to use the claims that cognitive linguistics makes about general features of cognitive processing to analyze the assumptions of existing theories of implicature, so as to facilitate the integration of previous findings into the new framework. The traditional definition of implicature as a logical process for the detection and interpretation of non-literal meaning is replaced by a characterization in terms of such concepts as image-schemata and cross-domain mappings. The cognitive domain of conversation is characterized in terms of the structures it inherits through mappings from the domains of communication and cooperation, and the study concludes with a discussion of the implications of this characterization for related areas of inquiry.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Raskin, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Linguistics|Communication
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