ABSTRACT
One common feature shared by the terms introduced above is that such kinds of pragmatic meaning are inferred rather than completely encoded. That is, pragmatic meaning is never directly gleaned from the encoded meaning of linguistic expressions alone, and can only be obtained by making contextualized inferences, using the linguistic expressions as the starting point of total meaning construction. Hence what matters is not just the identification and analysis of pragmatic phenomena per se, but also the characterization of the general inferential mechanism involved. This calls for the need of an explanatory theory of pragmatics that can give an adequate account of the inferential mechanism, has the potential of giving unified analyses of all the pragmatic phenomena, and is sympathetic and compatible with recent developments in related areas and disciplines, notably cognitive science, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, clinical linguistics, natural language logic, artificial intelligence and information technology.
