Exploring the Neurological Substrates of Pragmatics: Insights from Neuroscience

In most cases, when the left hemisphere suffers damage, there is a loss of language use. In the past, this evidence has led doctors to speculate on the presence of several language centres located in the left hemisphere, each specializing in a specific task. According to the classic model, Wernicke’s area is responsible for encoding incoming messages, while Broca’s area is responsible for encoding outgoing messages. These two areas communicate with each other thanks to specific nerve pathways (Arcuate Fasciculus). Selective damage to one of these areas causes different types of speech disorders, called “aphasias”. Although this model has lost validity over time, it has strongly influenced the current classification of aphasias. Previously, scholars believed that the syntactic and semantic errors found in different types of aphasia were due to the role the left hemisphere plays in processing the formal aspects of language. In particular, they believed that the pragmatic skills of aphasics were intact or, if pragmatic deficits were present, they derived from syntactic and semantic ones. This view seems to go in the direction of the Gricean theory of implicatures. Grice argues that pragmatic processes depend on the ability to make inferences, operating on a linguistic input that already has a semantic structure. These processes enrich what is said, the proposition in a minimal sense. In other words, there is a separation between the domain of semantics and pragmatics. Each of the two fields maintains a specific character of autonomy and independence. This separation would also be maintained in the brain. However, some recent studies on neuroscience are bringing up a different picture: It would seem that the integration of extra-linguistic data in language networks would actively affect the understanding and production of verbal messages. These new results move in the direction of contextualist positions. Proponents of this trend suggest that processes of pragmatic nature intrude into semantics to determine “what is said”. Some of these processes are not required by linguistic materials; nevertheless, they affect the propositional content conveyed by the utterance. Both the recent reflections in neuroscience and those in the philosophy of language have significant consequences on the way of seeing some neuropathological conditions, such as aphasia. Semantic and syntactic deficits do not determine pragmatic deficits, as was believed. On the contrary, the pragmatics of the discourse and the clues disseminated in the context can favour communication and compensate for deficiencies at the syntactic/semantic level.