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.
