Is pragmatics epiphenomenal? Evidence from communication disorders

In recent years there has been a converging trend in the study of pragmatics, grammar, language acquisition and neurolinguistics which sees as secondary epiphenomena a wide range of phenomena which were once regarded as primary. Examples of this trend in pragmatics include relevance theory, which explains speech acts and implicatures in terms of a more fundamental principle of relevance, and conversation analysis, which sees notions such as ‘topic’ as by-products of conversational coherence. In this paper I adopt a similarly ‘minimalist’ approach which focuses on the cognitive aetiology of pragmatics. Pragmatics is seen as the consequence of interactions between a set of linguistic and nonlinguistic cognitive subsystems which determine the crucial balance between how much information is encoded linguistically and how much is left unsaid on the grounds that it is recoverable from the linguistic and nonlinguistic context of utterance. Since it is often only when a complex system goes wrong that we become aware of the individual contributions of its component subsystems, my empirical evidence for the various cognitive entities discussed in this paper is the behaviour of people with communication disorders. Data from of a wide range of developmental and acquired language pathologies are presented in support of my argument. The approach adopted makes it possible to be more precise about the cognitive basis of pragmatics.