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Part of
Relevance Theory: Recent developments, current challenges and future directions
Edited by Manuel Padilla Cruz
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 268] 2016
► pp. 287–305

Perlocutionary effects and relevance theory

| University of Warsaw

The paper adopts and modifies Austin’s (1962) notion of perlocutionary effects and argues for recognizing the significance of such effects in communication. I draw a parallel between persuasion, which has received much attention in RT and is believed to be intrinsically linked to comprehension, and other effects, such as amusement or taking offence. I hypothesise that the latter occur not merely as consequences of interpretations consisting in an explicature and a set of implicatures, but that they may also have some impact on the inferential path and ultimately on the outcome of the comprehension process. To support this view, I refer to selected psychological findings on the inseparability of cognition and affect in stimuli processing.

Keywords: (non-)communicated speech acts, affective states, illocutionary force, perlocutionary effect, utterance interpretation
Published online: 20 October 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.268.11pis
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