Beyond the Meaning of Words: Issues in Neuropragmatics, Clinical Pragmatics and Schizophrenic Language

Over the last decades, theoretical and empirical evidence, first provided by language pragmatics and then by clinical pragmatics and neuropragmatics, has shown the importance of context and of the effective uses of languages in the analysis of the functioning of verbal communication, under normal and deficit conditions, starting from the assumption that communicating verbally means “acting”, i.e., performing linguistic acts that convey communicative intentions. If using verbal language also means performing real communicative acts, through which the speakers express their own intentions, desires, thoughts, emotions, opinions, then, in order to fully understand linguistic actions, it is crucial to go beyond the grammatical and literal meaning of statements, thus involving the notion of context. More generally, this paper analyses the case of subjects with right-hemisphere brain damage, which shows the central (yet not exclusive) role of the right hemisphere in the elaboration of the context, and focuses on a particular set of pragmatic deficits: those of schizophrenia. Though a central aspect of this mental illness is a pragmatic behaviour disorder, and, particularly, disorganized thought and speech, it is nevertheless combined with a deficit in social cognition. However, to ensure a more comprehensive picture of the complex phenomenology of the schizophrenic language and thought, it is fundamental to integrate current models of clinical pragmatics and neuropragmatics with the perspective of classical psychopathology. Deeply understanding the functioning of human language and some of its essential aspects, particularly pragmatic competence, also through the study of its disorders, allows, at the same time, shedding light on the longstanding issue of the relation between language and cognition.