Abstract

Cognitive pragmatics focuses on the mental states and, to some extent, the mental correlates of the participants of a conversation. The analysis of the mental processes of human communication is based on three fundamental concepts: cooperation, sharedness, and communicative intention. All of the three were originally proposed by Grice in 1975, though each has since been refined by other scholars. The cooperative nature of communication is justified by the evolutionary perspective through which the cooperative reasoning underlying a conversation is explained. Sharedness accounts for the possibility of comprehending non-standard communication such as deceit, irony, and figurative language. Finally, communicative intention presents the unique characteristic of recursion, which is, according to most scientists, a specific trademark of humans among all living beings.