The role of salience in processing pragmatic units

Abstract

The goal of the paper is twofold. Firstly, it explains the relevance of the Graded Salience Hypothesis (Giora 1997; 2003; Kecskés 2001) to pragmatics research, arguing that although this hypothesis is a psycholinguistic theory it may contribute significantly to our understanding of pragmatic processing. Secondly, it will be claimed and demonstrated through examples that the salient meaning of lexical units constituting utterances in conversation plays a more important role in comprehension than has been believed by the supporters of linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic theories that consider context to be the main source of actual contextual meaning.

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