The вЂњmeaningsвЂќ spontaneously associated by informants with isolated forms were not the pristine core meanings that we yearned for they were only defaults made extremely probable by culture, norms, and lack of imagination.

Lakoff 1987, Langacker 1987, Sweetser 1990) that the line in the sand between semantics and pragmatics was not an easy one to draw. It became clear to an evergrowing number of researchers (e.g. However, the very linguistic work that had contributed to an explosion of pragmatics was about to lead to its reassessment. Pragmatics exploded into a rich, but not particularly well-deп¬Ѓned, п¬Ѓeld of inquiry. There was a convergence of issues of common interest to philosophers, linguists, and others who ponder the mysteries of meaning. Linguists in the late 1960s, and through the 1970s and beyond, noted many features of grammar that were associated with pragmatic properties, and that in turn led linguists to study pragmatics in its own right and for its own sake. Interestingly, GriceвЂ™s work was originally motivated by logical considerations вЂ“ keeping the logic of semantic meanings simple and standard by accounting pragmatically for apparent complexities.

In modern linguistic and philosophical research, the best-known efforts in this direction are the Gricean scheme of maxims and implicatures and the theory of speech acts developed by Austin and Searle. A popular scheme to emerge from work in pragmatics preserved the intuition that form had meaning ex tempore, but added to the arsenal of meaning theorists a very powerful pragmatic component that could use context and pragmatic principles to derive from the pristine meaning of a form in isolation the messier meaning of that form when mired in context. But important work in pragmatics over several decades of the same century has shown the assumption of invariant meaning to be simplistic. Twentieth-century attempts to study meaning most often reп¬‚ect this intuition by assigning to every form its вЂњmeaningвЂќ independently of context. Quite naturally, we feel that the meanings are in the words and in their combinations. Consciously, we experience words, word combinations, and the automatic sensation of knowing what they mean. In everyday life, when we use or hear words in a language we know, in a culture we know, meanings form instantly.

Conversely, many of the seemingly complicated, irregular, and вЂњillogicalвЂќ properties of language structures become intelligible when their cognitive underpinnings are discovered. Language, which we do experience consciously through sound, gesture, or writing, is a spectacular but far from transparent window into this backstage cognition of our minds. For the most part, the operations and processes that correspond to those powerful capacities are carried out massively below the level of our consciousness. Distinctive and powerful cognitive capacities such as analogy, framing, metaphor, schematization, recursion, reference-point organization, and conceptual blending lie at the heart of perception, conception, and action, and suffuse our lives with rich meaning вЂ“ sometimes unbearably rich meaning. They are not, and we are not, passive interpreters of that world. It is now widely understood that brains and cultures play a major role in constructing the world as we see it. Abduction in Natural Language UnderstandingДЄs we start a new century, rich and diverse evidence from the social and cognitive sciences continues to provide an ever sharper conception of the way we humans think. Pragmatic Aspects of Grammatical Constructions Relevance Theory and the Saying/Implicating Distinction Pragmatics and the Philosophy of Language Some Interactions of Pragmatics and Grammar Constraints on Ellipsis and Event Reference The Pragmatics of Deferred Interpretation Empathy and Direct Discourse Perspectives

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