From the point of view of cognitive development, the present paper by Bart Geurts is highly relevant, welcome and timely. It speaks to a fundamental puzzle in developmental pragmatics that used to be seen as such, then was considered to be resolved by many researchers, but may return nowadays with its full puzzling force. The puzzle in question is the following: on broadly Gricean accounts, how should young children ever be able to start communicating, given that even basic conversation requires heavy cognitive machinery of recursive higher-order mindreading, and given that young children appear not to be such higher-order mindreaders yet? (Which, in fact, as much research suggests, they may actually become over development as a consequence rather than as a precursor of language acquisition.) This puzzle has been most clearly described by Richard Breheny in 2006 in the form of a trilemma (Breheny 2006): (i) Verbal communication requires higher-order intentionality (that is, a propositional attitude “Theory of Mind” – as it is often called in developmental psychology – that involves concepts of belief, etc.) (ii) Young children before age 4 do not yet have such a Theory of Mind; yet (iii) Young children clearly do engage in verbal communication.

中文翻译：

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承诺共享是迈向发展合理的言语行为理论的关键一步吗？

从认知发展的角度来看，Bart Geurts的这篇论文具有高度的相关性，欢迎性和及时性。它说出了发展语用学的一个基本谜题，过去人们通常认为它是这样，然后被许多研究人员解决，但如今可能会以其令人费解的力量再次出现。问题的谜题如下：从广义上讲，对于Gricean而言，鉴于即使是基本的对话也需要沉重的递归高阶思维阅读的认知机制，并且鉴于幼儿似乎并非如此，因此应该如何开始交流。高级阅读器了吗？（实际上，正如许多研究表明的那样，它们实际上可能是结果的过度发展而不是语言习得的先驱。）这个难题在2006年由理查德·布雷尼（Richard Breheny）最清楚地描述为三难状态（Breheny 2006）：（i）言语交际需要更高阶的意向性（即命题态度“心灵理论” —照原样）在发展心理学中通常被称为–涉及信念等概念。）（ii）4岁之前的幼儿还没有这样的心理理论；（iii）年幼的孩子显然确实在进行口头交流。