The Dark Matter of Pragmatics: Known Unknowns

This Element tries to discern the known unknowns in the field of pragmatics, the 'Dark Matter' of the title. We can identify a key bottleneck in human communication, the sheer limitation on the speed of speech encoding: pragmatics occupies the niche nestled between slow speech encoding and fast comprehension. Pragmatic strategies are tricks for evading this tight encoding bottleneck by meaning more than you say. Five such tricks are reviewed, which are all domains where we have made conside...