engleski

Pragmatic aspects of reasoning in real life situations

It is a well established fact that people, when reasoning, do not follow the laws of logic but provide information that they consider relevant for the discourse situation. In fact, the inferences that are found in spoken language are often logically invalid. In this study we analyze the Croatian corpus of spontaneous spoken language to find patterns of reasoning and analyze them. In order to convey the intended meaning participants in the conversation rely on the discourse markers. We concentrate on 'If - then', 'therefore', 'moreover' and 'although' discourse markers as the facilitators of logical or causal inferences.The analysis will include two aspects of reasoning: logical form of the inferences found in spoken language and the quantity and the precision of the information that is exchanged in the discourse situation (e. g. how precise speakers are in telling time regarding the discourse situation). The corpus consists of 51 transcripts of spontaneous conversations between Croatian adult speakers (20+) and is analyzed with CHAT/CLAN programme package. The study is conducted within the project "Adult language processing" (UIP-11- 2013) founded by Croatian Science Foundation.

reasoning ; relevance theory ; discourse ; spoken language corpora

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