This paper aims to assess current theoretical findings on the origin of coordination by salience and suggests a way to clarify the existing framework. The main concern is to reveal how different coordination mechanisms rely on specific epistemic aspects of reasoning. The paper highlights the fact that basic epistemic assumptions of theories diverge in a way that makes them essentially distinctive. Consequently, recommendations and predictions of the traditional views of coordination by salience are, in principle, based on the processes related to the agent’s presumptions regarding the cognitive abilities of a co-player. This finding implies that we should consider these theories as complementary, and not competitive, explanations of the same phenomenon.
The slogans and pictorial elements of press advertisements contain the most important elements of the message communicated to the viewers by the advertiser. They have to be formulated and composed in such a way as to ensure the most uniform reading and interpretation among potentially diverse recipients. It is interesting to what an extend such an effect would be reported by relatively homogenous respondents. The present study investigates the interpretation and recall of advertising slogans and foregrounded information by a group of 60 young people, following a short exposure to 5 press advertisements. It also attempts to compare the results to a previous research on mental processing of hidden and inconspicuous elements in press commercials (Wojtaszek 2007).
For a long time metonymy was held to be a figure of speech in which a name of one concept is substituted for that of another closely associated concept. Compared to this, holistic cognitive linguistics re-evaluated the concept of metonymy. From this point of view metonymy is first of all a conceptual process, thus metonymic relations are in effect conceptual relations which characterize not only our language use but also our everyday life, thought and behaviour. However, many researchers think that the cognitive approach of metonymy is too general. In their opinion metonymic expressions are essentially elliptical structures, and they try to explain the phenomenon by studying the semantic structures of words, the syntactic structures of sentences, and pragmatic factors. For the present, results of psycholinguistic experiments which analyse how we comprehend metonymic expressions support both approaches. Accordingly, in the case of some metonymic types comprehension takes place through the activation of metonymic relations, while in other cases hearers (or readers) have to complement the elliptical linguistic structure. It seems that metonymy is a very complex phenomenon where besides the different metonymic types we have to consider various processing strategies.
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