‘Pragmatic punting’ and prosody

The aim of this chapter is to present the notion of “pragmatic punting” as the cognitive process that confirms that communication in interaction has achieved its goal. The theoretical tenets of this mechanism are based on the principles of communicative context and on the Dynamic Model of Meaning. The study compares the prosodic patterns of pragmatic markers in the London-Lund Corpus and in the LINDSEI Corpus (the Spanish section) in order to describe the prototypical realization of pragmatic punting in native and non-native English conversation respectively. The results show the disparity in the use of pragmatic punting between both groups of speakers. The conclusions indicate that the improvement of the non-natives’ awareness of the intonation patterns and distribution of pragmatic markers would contribute to the improvement of their communicative competence.