Book Review Cognitive Pragmatics. The Mental Processes of Communication

In Cognitive Pragmatics. The Mental Processes of Communication, published by the MIT Press in 2010 and translated from Italian into English by John Douthwaite, Bruno Bara takes a cognitive perspective, investigating communication through different viewpoints (neuroscience, anthropology, pragmatics, psychology, philosophy, theory of games) in the six chapters constituting the book. In his preface, Bara defines communication as a conscious, deliberate and cooperative activity, in which two or more agents together construct meaning. Every communicative encounter is an activity and an enterprise: successes and failures are equally distributed among the participants. In the first chapter, Not Just Language: A Taxonomy of Communication, Bara translates Paul Grice's philosophy (Grice, 1989) into his own theory: As Grice wrote, "if A wishes to say something by means of a given behaviour, A must have the intention of bringing about a given effect in her interlocutor, an effect that is realized at least in part thanks to the fact that the hearer recognises that the speaker intends to convey something to him" (p. 16). He concludes that we can speak of communication when there is mutual wilfulness. Communication is a process (not a product) and communicating involves two different ways of processing data: the same input may be analyzed from a linguistic and from an extralinguistic standpoint. Specifically, linguistic communication is compositional and systematic: it enables an infinite productivity of lexical meanings and the possibility of spatial-temporal displacement thanks to particular indicators of reference. On the contrary, † Theories and Methodologies of e-Learning and Media Education, University of Padua, Italy