Question

how conversation can reflect the pragmatic components of speech production focusing on different examples. be sure to mention relevant research

Answer 1

Pragmatic choice in conversation

What speakers say in conversation depends on many factors, including people’s assumptions about the context and their communicative task. The study of linguistic pragmatics has been specifically devoted to how people use and understand language in context, with many scholars seeking to explain speakers’ particular choice of words in dialogs. Many pragmatic theories assume that pragmatics is its own proprietary set of knowledge skills guiding context‐sensitive language use, somewhat akin to other substantial bodies of linguistic competences, such as phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Our purpose in this article is to advance a view of pragmatics based on the principles of complexity theory, which specifically explains the pragmatic choices speakers make in conversations. The concept of self‐organized criticality sheds light on how a history of utterances and subtle details of a situation surrounding a conversation may directly specify language behavior. Under this view, pragmatic choice in discourse does not reflect the output of any dedicated pragmatic module but arises from a complex coordination or coupling between speakers and their varying communicative tasks.

2. Deciding what to say

Much research on language production maintains that speech begins within the general cognitive system where thoughts and intentions originate, which then gets transformed through a series of separable components in words, syntax, and finally speakers’ utterances .People are sometimes aware of their thoughts and intentions, and even what words and syntax to use, as they strategically plan what to say in specific social circumstances . But for the most part, language production is seen “as an almost paradigmatic example of a modular system . . . in which processes at one level (e.g., syntactic encoding) are encapsulated from the processes occurring at other levels (e.g., phonological encoding)” . Even at the level of pragmatics, where speakers must decide what words are most appropriate given the context, it is widely argued that different types of pragmatic knowledge are fully modular .Thus, what gets spoken is causally driven by distinct modular mechanisms responsible for different pragmatic actions , a version of the belief in “massive modularity” as the fundamental architecture of mind