Page 69 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

A cognitive pragmatic perspective on communication and culture 47

assumptions to the addressee/audience) is the cause of miscommunication. In
(4) and (5), communicators try to manipulate the addressee/audience by con-
cealing their informative intentions. Overt (i.e. ostensive) communication is a
particularly efficient means for spreading representations, precisely because os-
tensive stimuli are presumed to come from a helpful source: if the addressee can
assume that the ostensive stimulus is the best one that the communicator could
have chosen in order to convey a particular set of belief-assumptions, they are in
a position to narrow their search for cognitive effects. The interpretation (i.e. the
set of cognitive effects) which is most salient in the addressee’s immediate con-
text, is also the most likely to be optimally relevant. If it is not, the context is
suitably adjusted (by discarding some assumptions and introducing others) until
enough effects are derived for the communicative act to be found consistent
with the Principle of Relevance (or until processing is abandoned and communi-
cation fails). Such adjustments to the context draw freely on the addressee’s
world knowledge, more technically, their cognitive environment:

Cognitive environment (of an individual)
The set of assumptions that are manifest to an individual at a given time.
Carston (2002: 376)

Informally, the term “manifest” means “salient”. In Relevance Theory, mani-
festness is defined as follows:
Manifestness (of an assumption to an individual)
The degree to which an individual is capable of mentally representing an assumption
and holding it as true or probably true at a given moment.
Carston (2002: 378)
The concept of cognitive environment is crucial in explaining ostensive-infer-
ential communication, because a person’s cognitive environment sets a limit on
the contexts which are available to them. The concept of manifestness points to
the fact that the cognitive environments of two (or more) people may differ, not
only with respect to which assumptions are available to them at a given time, but
also in terms of the extent to which they are able to represent them mentally and
to use them in mental processing. Therefore, in deciding which ostensive stimu-
lus to use, the communicator needs to assess which contextual assumptions are
available to the addressee and how manifest they are to them. These judgements
are based on the communicator’s presumptions about the participants’ shared
cognitive environment. More technically, they are based on their mutual cogni-
tive environment:
Mutual cognitive environment
A cognitive environment which is shared by a group of individuals and in which it is
manifest to those individuals that they share it.
Carston (2002: 378)