关键词: 神经语用学, 预设, 会话含义, 语用推理

Abstract: The goal of neuropragmatics is to reveal the brain machinery underlying context-appropriate language use or comprehension, with the aid of psychological and especially cognitive neuroscience techniques. Although it is a quite new research field, neuropragmatics has already made important advances concerning traditionally research topics in pragmatics such as presupposition, conversational implicature, pragmatic inference, and discourse anaphora. In order to let Chinese scholars grasp the latest research trends of neuropragmatics, this paper reviews some of the most important advances in the field of neuropragmatics in last decade, and reaches some preliminary research conclusions. These studies have tested whether there are psychological realities underlying those previously proposed pragmatic principles or hypothesis with the help of event-related potentials (ERPs) or neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The findings from those studies could enhance our understanding of the physiological and cognitive nature of many pragmatic phenomena.