Modelling thought in language use: At the crossroads between discourse, pragmatics, and cognition

Sažetak: This article studies a number of semantic and pragmatic phenomena with consequences for the development of discourse. Thus, our study of the way we make use of cognitive models in discourse allows us to postulate the principle of “Metaphoric Source Selection”: the metaphorical extension of a concept can only select partial structure from this concept to construct the metaphoric source. The recognition of degrees of centrality in semantic specifications underlies the “Peripherality Principle”, a discourse principle grounded in the “Principle of Relevance”: when the most central characterization of a concept is not capable of creating discourse coherence, speakers turn to less central specifications and select the one that best satisfies the conditions of relevance. We then address the question of the pragmatic grounding of so-called cohesion and coherence in discourse. We claim that ellipsis and substitution are discourse phenomena subject to pragmatic constraints and argue for the existence of the “Conceptual Structure Selection Principle”, which accounts for the semantic scope of ellipsis and substitution devices: these have within their scope as much structure as is not cancelled out by the discourse unit that contains the cohesion device. We have redefined the cohesion- coherence distinction as one between procedural and conceptual connectivity and have formulated two further principles of discourse connectivity: the “Principle of Iconicity” and the “Principle of Conceptual Prominence”. There is a large amount of evidence that iconic arrangements are an important aspect of discourse coherence. Still, there is little work done with respect to the principles that regulate non-iconic arrangements. The Principle of Conceptual Prominence, which accounts for the special discourse status of prominent non-iconic information, fills this vacuum. The final part of this research work focuses upon the analysis of discourse strategies as non-conventional sets of procedures that allow speakers to create and interpret procedurally and conceptually connected texts. Two reverse discourse strategies are formulated, both related to the balance between procedural and conceptual markers of discourse connectivity. To this we add two other discourse principles, the “Principle of Internal Contrast” and the “Principle of External Contrast”. The former is based upon explicit procedural operations, whereas the latter makes use of conceptual connectivity. Lastly, we distinguish two more discourse principles that constrain strategic discourse activity: the “Principle of Conceivability”, which regulates conceptual links with situations in terms of the possibility of creating plausible mental scenarios for them; and the “Principle of Relative Distance”, which helps sort out ambiguities in anaphoric operations on the basis of the relative distance between the anaphoric pronoun and its potential antecedent as licensed by the Principle of Conceivability.