Grammatical comprehension in developmental semantic-pragmatic disorder

Pragmatic Aspects of Grammatical Constructions

1. Introduction. Constructions and Pragmatics What do constructional approaches to grammar have to contribute to linguistic pragmatics? A careful answer to this question would require prior specification of which approaches should properly be called 'constructional' and also what exactly is intended by 'linguistic pragmatics'. Conscientiously discharging these preparatory obligations could requ...

Electrophysiology and Pragmatic Language Comprehension

The Pragmatic Nature of Grammatical Categories

This paper promotes the hypothesis that central grammatical categories must be analysed as pragmatic rather than semantic entities, in order to explain their seemingly redundant typological distribution. A case is made of the relatively complex English past tense system versus the single Russian past tense, and it is shown how the distinctions within the former system can be analysed in terms o...

Pragmatic Comprehension in Schizophrenia: Metaphor and Irony

Many schizophrenic patients are reported to have impaired theory-of-mind (ToM) and/or formal thought disorder and as these terms will be referred to throughout the research it is important to briefly clarify their meanings. The ability to make appropriate inferences about other people's thoughts when the objective facts do not allow these thoughts to be directly understood is referred to as the...

Semantic meaning and pragmatic interpretation in 5-year-olds: evidence from real-time spoken language comprehension.

Recent research on children's inferencing has found that although adults typically adopt the pragmatic interpretation of some (implying not all), 5- to 9-year-olds often prefer the semantic interpretation of the quantifier (meaning possibly all). Do these failures reflect a breakdown of pragmatic competence or the metalinguistic demands of prior tasks? In 3 experiments, the authors used the vis...