UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 11 (1999)
Metarepresentation in linguistic communication
DEIRDRE
This paper is designed to illustrate and consider the relations between three types
of metarepresentational ability used in verbal comprehension: the ability to
metarepresent attributed thoughts, the ability to metarepresent attributed
utterances, and the ability to metarepresent abstract, non-attributed
representations (e.g. sentence types, utterance types, propositions). Aspects
of these abilities have been separately considered in the literatures on
"theory of mind", Gricean pragmatics and quotation. The aim of this
paper is to show how the results of these separate strands of research might be
integrated with an empirically plausible pragmatic theory.
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