Conceptual Meaning, Procedural Meaning And Utterance Comprehension

Utterance production and utterance comprehension are two main themes in pragmatics. Utterance comprehension is an extremely complicated problem. Lots of researchers paid much attention on the comprehension of the discourse connective, one of the important pragmatic areas.Utterance interpretation, according to the Relevance Theoretic view, involves decoding, which leads to an incomplete representation, and inference, the result of which is a set of fully propositional representations. In other words, utterance interpretation requires two basic tools: representation and computation. Blakemore (1987, 1989) and Wilson & Sperber (1993) differentiate two basic types of encoded meaning. The first type is conceptual meaning, which is associated with representation. The second type is procedural meaning, which is associated with computation.In order to gain some insight into the pragmatic area of discourse connectives and utterance comprehension, the following questions is raised accordingly: what does the role the procedural meaning play in the process of utterance comprehension?Chapter one presents some research background.In chapter two, some confusing terms and related theories are clarified, such as informative intention and communicative intention, ostensive-inferential communication, cognitive environments and mutual manifestness, concepts and procedures, conceptual meaning and procedural meaning, explicature and implicature, contextual effects and processing effort, the psycholinguistic theory and a relevance theoretic account of although.In chapter three, two hypotheses are first presented: the conceptual meaning...