Appropriate Pragmatic Behaviour: Response to Foster-Cohen and Wong

Abstract

In my comment on Foster-Cohen and Wong (Early intervention at the interface: semantic-pragmatic strategies for facilitating conversation with children with developmental disabilities. In: Depraetere I, Salkie R (eds) Drawing a line. Perspectives on the semantics-pragmatics interface. Springer, Cham, pp 00–01, 2016), I focus on how pragmatic impairment and strategies to improve pragmatic behaviour contribute to our understanding of the semantics-pragmatics interface. I argue that the two main points papers like theirs show are the following: first, in studying pragmatics, we cannot purely rely on competence, but we have to take into account performance, that is, actual behaviour; second, there is no straightforward subsequency relation between semantics and pragmatics: pragmatics intervenes before and after semantics.