Socio-pragmatic Study of Idioms and Proverbs

Cognitive Pragmatics is part of cognitive linguistics. It is an approach to linguistic meaning which appeared as a result of dissatisfaction with formal pragmatics because it cannot describe the cognitive process of understanding some expressions such as idioms and proverbs adequately.The most two striking claims made by cognitive pragmatics is that, firstly, there is an intentional nature of human communication: specifically, the idea that the use of language on the part of the speaker is instrumental to conveying their communicative intention (i.e., his intention to communicate something specific to the situation) and, reciprocally, what the addressee aims to is the recognition of such an intention. Secondly is the inferential (and in a sense, rational) nature of human communication, that is, the idea that both the speaker and the addressee are involved in a form of practical reasoning: the speaker has to find out which utterance is a suitable means for the addressee to recover his communicative intention (in context), while the addressee has to travel the same path in the opposite direction— from the means (i.e., the utterance) to the communicative goal of the speaker. As a matter of fact, however, scholars in cognitive pragmatics have spent their efforts almost exclusively in the analysis of the latter process of understanding: how the addressee comes to identify the communicative intention of the speaker, as well as, the factors that participate in constructing meaning of such implicatures. In additions, they investigated how far these factors are interconnected.