春雨直播app

This book is a revised Japanese translation of Gunter Senft’s Understanding Pragmatics (Routledge, 2014).
 
Pragmatics is a sub-field of linguistics. If one thinks of language as being divided into two aspects, structure and use, pragmatics is concerned with the latter. This book discusses the background to and history of influential theories of language and philosophy, psychology, behavior, thought, culture, society, and politics. This list of related fields highlights the interdisciplinary nature of pragmatics, notably its potential to become a starting point for interdisciplinary research and expand into further fields of study.
 
Let us consider one example: the relationship between language and thought. In 2024, a paper titled “Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought” was published in Nature (Fedorenko, 2024). This paper cited neuroscience findings showing that the parts of the brain involved in the understanding and generation of language are different from those associated with thought. It maintained that language and thought have fundamentally different functions. It also argued that language properties, such as phonemics, vocabulary, and grammar, are optimized for communication.
 
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is a widely known theory about the relationship between language and thought. The strong version of this hypothesis—that language determines thought—has been disproven, but softer versions maintaining that language influences the way people think are still discussed in a number of fields. This book explains recent findings by the Max Planck Institute and psycho-linguist Dan Slobin’s insight that “the expression of experience in linguistic terms constitutes ‘thinking for speaking’ – a special form of thought that is mobilized for communication.” These findings and insights are closely related to our understanding of how brain areas concerned with language and thought are related to each other.
 
The translation has been revised to make it accessible not only to specialists outside the field of pragmatics but also to general readers. In the case of citations of works that have also been translated into Japanese, the locations of the cited parts in the Japanese version have been indicated. This work will be useful to those interested in the role of language in human society and culture.
 
Reference:
Fedorenko, Evelina, Piantadosi, Steven T., & Gibson, Edward A. F. (2024). Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought. Nature, 575–586.
 

(Written by ISHIZAKI Masato, Professor, Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies / 2024)