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Relevance Theory: Recent developments, current challenges and future directions
Edited by Manuel Padilla Cruz
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 268] 2016
► pp. 33–58

The speaker’s derivational intention

| Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Adopting the basic tenets of relevance theory, Powell (2010) introduces the concept of derivational intention as something separate from a speaker’s informative intention. The derivational intention of a speaker is an intention concerning the pragmatically inferred route that the hearer should take in order to recognize the speaker’s informative intention. This paper addresses what can happen when a speaker’s derivational intention is at odds with a particular piece of procedural information encoded by some linguistic expression, with the conceptual semantics of a lexical item, or with the procedural meaning of an intonation pattern employed by the speaker. The procedural meaning of one expression may override that of a co-occurring expression when there is a conflict between them.

Keywords: derivational intention, focus, informative intention, intonation, procedural meaning/information
Published online: 20 October 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.268.02fre
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