ABSTRACT
A crit ical point in the com pre hen sion pro cess is reached when the listener understands not just what the speaker said, but what was meant. This is a complex skill that can fail even in com pet ent adults: Shakespearean plays and TV soap operas alike are replete with examples of how people can mis under stand one another’s mean ing. Infer ring another person’s communic ative intention is one aspect of the more general pro cess of using con text to dis ambiguate potentially ambigu ous mes sages, as dis cussed in Chapter 7 , and is an aspect of comprehen sion that comes clearly under the domain of pragmat ics. How ever, whereas Chapter 7 focused on chil dren’s ability to use general know ledge, envir on mental con text, and prior dis course as sources of inform a tion about mean ing, in this chapter we focus on how the social con text is used to inter pret messages. There are good reas ons for treat ing non social and social aspects of context sep arately, even though both are implicated in prag mat ics. In the phys ical, nonsocial world, our under standing of such notions as causality is based very much on what is phys ic ally observable.
