Functional pragmatics and cognitive linguistics

Functional cognitive linguistics encompasses a variety of descriptive models united by a core set of theoretical and methodological commitments. At the same time, functional cognitive models also vary in precisely what and how they are meant to investigate. Since the late 1990’s, following research in social psychology and pragmatics, there has been a surge of interest in the social (interactional and intersubjective) basis of linguistic cognition and its implications for functional cognitive descriptions. This in turn has created a new demand for pragmatic research that is jointly focused on the cognitive and sociocultural underpinnings of language use as a social cognitive activity, highlighting their mutually supportive roles for meaning generation in context. The paper emonstrates the applicability of this kind of pragmatic perspective by a functional cognitive approach to deixis and epistemic grounding