A Cognitive Pragmatics Approach to Metarepresentational Ability and Language Acquisition

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The theme of the present research is to try to explore based on relevance theory how metarepresentaition is incorporated into language. Uchida chaired a symposium titled 'On metarepresentation' at the 24th national convention of the English Linguistic Society of Japan. He also read a paper and Matusi contributed to the symposium as one of the speakers. Matusi covered a wide range of metarepresentational phenomena and Uchida introduced a new approach to quotation.The research results are seen in Uchida (2005, 2007a, 2007b), Yoshimura (2006, 2007a, 2007b), and Matsui (2005a, 2005b, 2006a, 2006b, 2007a, 2007b). Among others, Uchida (2005) applies metarepresentational phenomena to free indirect speech and Uchida (2007a) succeeds in explaining a relationship between deixis and metarepresentation.Language acquisition is especially discussed in Uchida (2007b) and Matsui (2005a, 2005b). Uchida (2007b) takes Japanese verbs kureru / morau / ageru as linguistic items where metarepresentational processes are linguistically realized. Matsui (2005a, 2005b) discuss datte in the view of theory of mind. Yoshimura (2006) surveys previous studies on metalinguistic negation and proposes her own original ideas, which leads to the present research.Uchida, et. al. (2008) is a translation of Robyn Carston's Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication, to which Uchida and Matsui contributed. The book is a major publication in relevance theory since Sperber and Wilson's Relevance: Communication and Cognition, and the present translation will be of great help to the students and researchers in Japan who are interested in cognitive pragmatics and/or relevance theory.