Chapter published in:
Dynamism in Metaphor and Beyond
Edited by Herbert L. Colston, Teenie Matlock and Gerard J. Steen
[Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication 9] 2022
► pp. 143–156

Communication, comprehension, and interpretation

Ray Gibbs has argued that three features of figurative utterance interpretation make it hard to envisage a unitary pragmatic theory, with a set of dedicated principles or mechanisms linked to “some specialized ‘pragmatics’ part of the mind”. First, a given figurative utterance may be interpreted radically differently in different contexts; second, pragmatic performance varies not only across, but within, individuals; third, figurative interpretation involves a mixture of conceptual, perceptual and sensorimotor information which cannot be adequately rendered in terms of a finite literal paraphrase. In this paper, I consider how relevance theory, an approach to pragmatics which incorporates such a set of dedicated pragmatic principles or mechanisms, might deal with the context-dependence, variability and indeterminacy of figurative interpretation in particular, and utterance interpretation in general.

Keywords: relevance, context, intentions, weak communication, allegory, metaphor
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Relevance, cognition and communication
  • 3.Comprehension and interpretation
  • 4.Indeterminacy in communication
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 09 September 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/milcc.9.08wil
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