Cognitive pragmatics: approaches and perspectives

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, cognitive pragmatics has become a novel and booming research discipline which synthesizes pragmatic and cognitive explanations of human communication. There is a vast number of approaches to cognitive pragmatics resulting both from different theoretical underpinnings and specific ethnic and social-cultural prerequisites of their development, so establishing the principles related to cognitive-pragmatic communication studies has become an urgent necessity. This article fills this gap by adopting theoretical insight into the leading cognitive-pragmatic approaches in western and Ukrainian linguistics. I claim that various approaches in cognitive pragmatics can be roughly divided according to the two leading vectors of theoretical perspectives: from cognitive – to pragmatic and from pragmatic – to cognitive frameworks of analysis. As my discussion demonstrates, growing numbers of empirical and theoretical studies examine cognitive-pragmatic aspects of both utterances / speech acts and discourses, namely their principles of politeness / impoliteness and discourse strategies, in intercultural and historical perspectives. The theoretic rationale for these studies is clear enough. Mental state attribution is integral to pragmatic and cognitive interpretation of processes of human communication. In cognitive pragmatics, which is characterized by highly synthetic and hybrid nature, this attribution is viewed holistically. The article reveals the distinctive characteristics of Ukrainian cognitive-pragmatic studies as compared to western researches. It proves that the cognitive-pragmatic interpretation of the construal of meaning-in-context in various discourses and utterances will have further implications in linguistics and humanities.