Pragmatext (4)

A pragmatic annotation model

All phenomena described here have a cognitive origin, hence they are universals. A cognitive phenomenon influences social interaction and language. Therefore, the verbal communication process can be analyzed from three closely related levels: cognitive social, pragmatic and linguistic.

At a cognitive social level, the theoretical framework described is based on the idea that human perception of reality is subjective: perception is the sum of what we perceive through our senses and our mental frameworks. Therefore language is a way of codification of perception and transmission of knowledge. However, at a pragmatic level, the transmission of knowledge could be limited by personal interests and different perspectives, even between members of the same community with a common socio-cultural background. Anyhow, human beings not only do an effort to argument their points of view, but also to reach an agreement about the perception of reality. After all, people aim to be understood in a way that their perception of events matches reality. Sharing information is the only chance to achieve this: we consider reality a constant negotiation process to define a common standard. When information is exchanged, the nature of the information affects the truth conditions of a statement. For example, it is important, sometime vital, to specify how we know something is true: we need to know the source of information to assess the truth of a statement.

At the linguistic level, each language offers its own grammatical resources to underline a cognitive phenomenon. In the Spanish language, these are expressed at different grammatical levels; e.g., reformulation is expressed at a prosodic (in C- ORAL-ROM transcribed as [/] and [///]) or lexical level (the discourse markers o sea, es decir). For this reason, tagsets must be conceived from semantics to grammatical categories. If we analyze, from a pragmatic perspective, a particular grammatical category, for example, the interjection, we run the risk of falling into unnecessary typologies and ambiguity problems. This is especially observed in categories such as interjections or adverbs which have always been problematic to traditional grammar. Hence, this first part of PRAGMATEXT project is focused on the words that modify the whole sentence: interjection, conjunctions, discourse markers, sentence-adverbs, etc.

The three levels of under which a communication process are analyzed are summarized in the table 1.3 below.