Rising influence of cognitive sciences on linguistics has been observed recently. This work aims at pointing out which role cognitive effort may play in natural language processing. From a pragmatic perspective various approaches to a plausible definition of cognitive effort are presented. Some introductory sections to pragmatics lead to a discussion on relevance theory. Also, a variety of markedness concepts are introduced. These are examined in regard to their utility for the description of context understood as a psychological construct. Finally, a natural language processing model is used to describe cognitive effort in the light of divers learning models.

The Author: Peter Schuster was born in 1967 in Heilbronn/Germany. He studied Linguistics and Business Administration at Stuttgart University where he graduated in November 1997. For his M.A. thesis he taped and transcribed spoken language in a British office in order to analyse the communicative functions and meanings of the word ‘right’ in relation to its position in the utterance.