Pragmatic markers: the missing link between language and Theory of Mind

By Paula Rubio-Fernández. 2020

41 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Language and Theory of Mind come together in communication, but their relationship has been intensely contested. I hypothesize that pragmatic markers connect language and Theory of Mind and enable their co-development and co-evolution through a positive feedback loop, whereby the development of one skill boosts the development of the other. I propose to test this hypothesis by investigating two types of pragmatic markers: demonstratives (e.g., ‘this’ vs. ‘that’ in English) and articles (e.g., ‘a’ vs. ‘the’). Pragmatic markers are closed-class words that encode non-representational information that is unavailable to consciousness, but accessed automatically in processing. These markers have been associated with implicit Theory of Mind because they are used to establish joint attention (e.g., ‘I prefer that one’) and mark shared knowledge (e.g., ‘We bought the house’ vs. ‘We bought a house’). Here I develop a theoretical account of how joint attention (as driven by the use of demonstratives) is the basis for children’s later tracking of common ground (as marked by definite articles). The developmental path from joint attention to common ground parallels language change, with demonstrative forms giving rise to definite articles. This parallel opens the possibility of modelling the emergence of Theory of Mind in human development in tandem with its routinization across language communities and generations of speakers. I therefore propose that, in order to understand the relationship between language and Theory of Mind, we should study pragmatics at three parallel timescales: during language acquisition, language use, and language change.

Subfields: Cultural Studies, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Cognitive Science & Psychology

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cultural Studies

1. Yejin Choi
2. Alessandro Lenci
3. Maarten Sap
4. Daniel Fried

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

1. Yejin Choi
2. Alessandro Lenci

In Cognitive Science & Psychology

1. Yejin Choi
2. Alessandro Lenci
3. Maarten Sap
4. Ronan Le Bras
5. Daniel Fried
6. Michal Kosinski

Citations in the corpus

• Neural Theory-of-Mind? On the Limits of Social Intelligence in Large LMs (2022, background): “and communication can frame our understanding of this link (Rubio-Fernandez, 2021), positing that one needs to reason about an interlocutor’s mental state (TOM) to effectively communicate and understand language (Grice, 1975; Fernández, 2013; Goodman and Frank, 2016; Enrici et al.”
• Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science. (2022, unknown): “All in all, this calls for finding common linguistic ground from which to understand andmeasure the potential linguistic roots of ToM, ideally tapping into linguistic resources with broad crosslinguistic attestation [102,103].”
• Understanding Natural Language Understanding Systems. A Critical Analysis (2023, background): “A lot of pragmatic aspects are strongly conventionalized and encoded in linguistic structures (Rubio-Fernández 2021).”