Relevance Theory meets Markedness

Rising influence of cognitive sciences on linguistics has been observed recently. This work aims at pointing out which role cognitive effort may play in natural language processing. From a pragmatic perspective various approaches to a plausible definition of cognitive effort are presented. Some introductory sections to pragmatics lead to a discussion on relevance theory. Also, a variety of markedness concepts are introduced. These are examined in regard to their utility for the description of context understood as a psychological construct. Finally, a natural language processing model is used to describe cognitive effort in the light of divers learning models.

Autorentext

The Author: Peter Schuster was born in 1967 in Heilbronn/Germany. He studied Linguistics and Business Administration at Stuttgart University where he graduated in November 1997. For his M.A. thesis he taped and transcribed spoken language in a British office in order to analyse the communicative functions and meanings of the word `right in relation to its position in the utterance.

Inhalt

Contents: Introduction to markedness The pragmatic perspective Reflections on relevance theory Cognitive markedness.