Abstract

 

For Sperber and Wilson the process of inferential comprehension is a global and not a local process, this means that the comprehension as a global process has free access to the information stored in the memory, while in the local deductive reasoning the comprehension is carried out from fixed premises (1986:65). Taking into account the above, the process of comprehension should not be understood as a logical process in a strict sense, but rather as a process in which the interlocutors access external information to make sense of what they read or hear and what they consider relevant. In this framework, the following work aims to describe and analyze from a pragmatic point of view, whether the elaboration of inferences from texts about Mexican culture in Colombian speakers, exchange students at a Mexican university, involves a global information process or local. For this study a reading test was applied from two texts in Spanish with topics related to Mexican culture. The resulting interpretations will be understood in this work as inferences that are then categorized into local and global level. Inferences at the local level are those that need to be interpreted with information provided in some part of the text, while inferences at a global level require information from the text in its entirety (Graesser, 1985) or from information external to it or stored in their memory. A total of 136 responses were analyzed to determine if the inferences were elaborated in the light of local or global information. The results show that the inferences constructed by the Colombian speakers use both local and global information; however, local information is more evident since they adhere to explicit information in the text and sometimes tend to add external information that comes from their knowledge of the world.

 

Key words: Relevance, inferences, comprehension, interpretation, Spanish as foreign language.