Lecture by Istvan Kecskes on ‘ The Effect of Salience on Shaping Speaker’s Utterance in the Socio-Cognitive Approach to Pragmatics ’

On September 13, at 10:30 am, Istvan Kecskes, Distinguished Professor of the State University of New York, will give a lecture at the HSE School of Linguistics on ‘The effect of salience on shaping speaker’s utterance in the socio-cognitive approach to pragmatics’.

Istvan Kecskes is editor at Intercultural Pragmatics and Chinese as a Second Language Research, founder of Mouton Series in Pragmatics, President of the American Pragmatics Association (AMPRA), and President of the Chinese as a Second Language Research (CASLAR) Association.

Address: 21/4 Staraya Basmannaya Ulitsa, Building 4; Room A-307

Abstract

The presentation discusses the role of salience on shaping speaker’s utterance within the framework of the socio-cognitive approach (SCA). SCA integrates the pragmatic view of cooperation and the cognitive view of egocentrism and emphasizes that both cooperation and egocentrism are manifested in all phases of communication, albeit to varying extents. It will be argued that speaker’s utterance is shaped not only by recipient design but also by salience effect. While fitting words into actual situational contexts speakers are driven not only by the intent that the hearer recognize what is meant as intended by the speaker, but also by individual salience that affects production subconsciously. The interplay of these social (recipient design) and individual factors (salience) shapes speaker utterance. Recipient design is the result of being cooperative, which, according to Grice is a part of human rationality. This presentation, however, claims that individual egocentrism that results in individual salience is just as a part of human rationality as cooperation.

Contact: Natalia Zevakhina, nzevakhina@hse.ru.