Neuropragmatics: A foreword

Consider the following utterances (and their interpretations): John is a shark (‘he is very aggressive’), She spilled the beans (‘she revealed the secret’), I’d like a rose OR a book (‘just one of them’), My soup is too cold to eat (‘bring me another one’), The lights have been on since last night. The car doesn’t start (‘because the battery is dead’). Such phenomena are known as metaphor, idiom, scalar implicature, indirect speech act and bridging inference, respectively. They are key notions in pragmatics, and they have been accounted for in philosophical and linguistic terms since at least the time of Grice. While being topics of multiple psycholinguistic investigations, today’s cutting-edge research has turned to focusing on how the brain supports the above mentioned pragmatic phenomena and, more generally, context-dependent linguistic usage. This is what this Special Issue of the Italian Journal of Linguistics is all about, as a showcase for the emerging field known as “neuropragmatics”. This Special Issue brings together, for the first time, state-of-theart overviews, original data and proposals of overarching principles regarding the brain mechanisms underlying a vast range of pragmatic phenomena. Each paper makes a significant contribution to the field, and these contributions are not simply juxtaposed. Although each paper can be appreciated separately, there is a tentative spatiotemporal elucidation of pragmatic processing that unfolds throughout the collection, an elucidation that keeps one eye on the available theoretical models and the other one on new paradigms to explore. The aim of this Special Issue, thus, is to provide not only a fairly comprehensive picture of prevailing individual research streams in neuropragmatics, but also a compact state-of-the-art with respect to the relationship between pragmatics and brain, with the ultimate hope of further helping define this emerging field. For those unfamiliar with neuropragmatics, this Special Issue may serve as a solid introduction, while for experts it will hopefully represent an accurate synthesis along with original data and promising ideas for the next research agenda.