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영어

This paper searches for neural bases of pragmatic principles. Over the past decades, functional imaging studies in neuropragmatics have located the brain areas responsible for processing individual pragmatic phenomena, in both clinical and non-clinical populations. In these are included a set of regions for the theory of mind mechanism (such as medial prefrontal cortex, temporo-pariental juncture, superior temporal sulcus, and precuneus), inferior parietal lobe, middle temporal gyrus, and many others; these areas are reported to activate in different combinations depending on stimuli. I compile these results to estimate what brain regions will be activated while processing utterances including an indirect request, metaphor, irony, and lying. Because pragmatic principles, by definition, take charge of processing any of these utterances, the neural bases for the principles will also activate whenever we process these utterances. The candidate neural correlates of pragmatic principles are (1) the theory of mind mechanism, (2) all the areas aggregated, and (3) nonentity. I suggest there might be no corresponding neural correlates for pragmatic principles in that there has not been any attempt to search for them and that neuropragmatics regards pragmatic impairments as the problem of anatomy, not as the problem of abstract principles.