Article for October: Pragmatic Choice in Conversation

In October we read the paper from Raymond W. Gibbs and Guy Van Orden, published in Topics in Cognitive Science in 2012, Pragmatic Choice in Conversation.

The authors are discussing regularity and variability in human conversation and the (in)ability of pragmatics theories to explain both of them. They offer to advance the view of pragmatics based on complexity theory in order to better explain the choices people make in conversations based on context and introduce the concept of self-organized criticality in order to explain how a common ground can affect language behavior. The conclusion that follows is that pragmatic choice in conversation is not a product of a specific module but it arises from coordination between speakers and their communicative tasks.

We hope this paper would inspire a discussion on pragmatics in linguistics (and beyond).

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