Inferential pragmatics is typically considered to deal exclusively with meaning that has been overtly and intentionally communicated. This paper sets out to investigate whether this established domain of enquiry can be extended to include instances of information transmission that may not be characterised by an underlying communicative intention on the part of a stimulus producer. Adopting a relevance-theoretic perspective, I argue that this can indeed be done and show how it can be quite naturally accommodated in the framework. The upshot of my argumentation in this regard is that pragmatic inference has a central role to play in interpretation even beyond the confines of what has been traditionally viewed as communication proper.
In this chapter I consider where contrastive stress fits within the relevance-theoretic model of utterance interpretation. In particular, I focus on contrastive stress as a cue to ostension which layers on top of the ostensive act of producing an utterance and which guides inferential processes. Stress patterns, however, only act as a cue to ostension when they are unexpected. It is the disconfirmation of expectations that puts the hearer to more effort and prompts the search for extra interpretive effects. The discussions in this chapter build on existing work on both prosody and pragmatics and the conclusions drawn have implications for our understanding of inferential processes, procedural meaning, and ostensive communication more generally.
This paper focuses on presupposition effects, in the light of Sperber and Wilson (2015). First, we define semantic presuppositions as determinate contents, which can in turn be instances of meaning or/and showing. A discussion is then engaged regarding the determinacy of semantic and discursive presuppositions, leading to the identification of a specific property of presuppositions, namely their contribution to the acceptance of an utterance (as per Sperber et al. 2010). The last section seeks to account for the ambivalent status of presuppositions, as they are both ostensive (i.e. triggered by an ostensive verbal stimulus) and relatively less ostensive. We conclude that a proper identification of presuppositions requires to go ‘within’ the speaker’s meaning, by adding an ‘ostensive’ and ‘less ostensive’ continuum to the showing – meaning diagram.
Preliminary evidence on non-propositional effects as indispensable to the informational content of metaphorical utterances is provided in Ifantidou (2019), Ifantidou and Hatzidaki (2019). The idea put forward was that the aesthetic apprehension of linguistic metaphors extends to enriching underdetermined aspects of propositional content.
In this paper, I further examine the distinguishing aspects of metaphors during interpretation. Following Sperber and Wilson 2015, Wilson and Carston 2019, I argue that an emotional response is triggered to the situation represented by the metaphor (see also Ifantidou 2019). I will suggest that metaphors enhance comprehension by being vehicles for emotions such as affection or dislike, as in texts which present difficulties in language comprehension. Ιn these cases, metaphors evoke non-propositional effects, such as images or emotional responses, by connecting to interpreters’ perceptions, memories, previous experiences, imagining, and beliefs. Evidence that addressees are able to derive meaning more frequently from metaphors than from literal sentences in equally supportive linguistic contexts (in terms of length, complexity, linguistic under-determinacy) attenuates the idea that metaphors enhance understanding as a merely linguistic tool, and reinforces the view that metaphorical processing involves a blend of language information with perceptual experience.
This chapter is concerned with what has traditionally been considered as ‘beyond meaning’: poetic metaphor. It specifically focuses on poetic metaphors of time, with the aim to address anew the relationship between pragmatic and cognitive linguistic approaches to metaphor (cf. Tendahl and Gibbs 2008; Wilson 2011). Such metaphors are shown to convey primarily an affective meaning, which can be best explained in terms of affective valence. At the level of metaphor comprehension, I argue for a synergy between metaphor theories but with appropriate adjustments in each framework: an extended view of encyclopedic entries for relevance theory, and a context-sensitive process of pragmatic inferencing for conceptual metaphor theory.
It’s a common intuition that literature is a special kind of language use, pursuing other aims than the mere transmission of information. This intuition is reflected in the notion that literature is art, whereas ordinary conversation is not, and that reading literature is a particular sort of experience, significant in a particular way. However, the common view in pragmatics is that literary works are not exceptional in terms of how language is used. In this paper, I discuss this issue by exploring Sperber and Wilson’s (2015) notion of ‘impressions’ and develop a tentative account of literature as triggering relevant imaginative experiences. These experiences, I argue, relate to expressivity and to affective, emotional, effects; they match readers’ expectations of relevance by means of their resonance with the individual’s own memories and imaginative experiences.
Drawing on the observation that speakers may use jokes as stylistic devices to communicate propositional meanings, this paper offers a relevance-theoretic account of pragmatic mechanisms involved in this kind of communication, dubbed ‘meaningful jokes.’ First, I argue that the comprehension of any joke not only relies on the hearer’s background knowledge, but may also lead to the modification of beliefs. Then I explore selected forms of expression which potentially bear affinity to meaningful jokes, such as fiction, metaphors, allegories, and irony. Finally, I postulate that meaningful jokes rely on a unique propositional attitude and emergent implicatures resulting from the incongruity between the joke’s scenario and a real-life situation in which it was intended to be relevant.
An ‘experience of ineffable significance’ is sudden feeling of knowing something very significant but which cannot be described in words, sometimes accompanied by chills or tears. Amongst its types are the sublime and (secular) ‘epiphanies’. Drawing on work by Huron and by Meyer, I propose that it is a type of surprise, arising from perceptions whose match to our schematic knowledge falls outside the normal range of discrepancy, either by radical discrepancy or by uncanny identity. Assuming a theoretical context of Relevance Theory, and drawing on work by Sperber and by Raffman, I explore some reasons how we are able to suddenly judge that the perception produces deeply significant knowledge, and why that knowledge cannot be expressed in words.
A challenge posed by modern art, especially since the birth of the readymade, is how it is possible to discern art from non-art; institutional theories of art suggest that institutional sanctioning is the primary condition for the identification of an object as art. Here, we propose an explanation for the way that such institutional sanctioning might be reflected in the cognitive work of a viewer, and describe this effect as part of a continuum of behaviours that generate deeper, more varied and ultimately more effort-intensive interpretations of both art and other aspects of the human experience.
The aim of this study is to shed light on the relationship between visual and verbal inputs into communication. To this end, I analysed the use of onomatopoeia as telop on Japanese TV in terms of the relevance theoretic notions of the showing-saying continuum and the definite-indefinite continuum. This analysis shows that onomatopoeia telop functions as a bridge between the verbal and non-verbal evidence in multimodal communicative acts, allowing for the interaction between different modes in terms of the distribution of intended imports in the two-dimensional view of meaning. Furthermore, this analysis, albeit in a limited manner, shows how relevance theory’s dynamic view of meaning can be successfully applied to an examination of a highly multimodal communicative act.
This chapter retraces Grice’s thought experiment on ‘creature construction’ (Grice 1975a), which attempts to show how complex psychological processes can be shown to emerge from less complex behaviours. Beginning with simple organisms, Grice’s experiment explores examines how an organism’s psychological processes work to construct representations of the surrounding environment in such a way that those representations can be utilised for survival. The more complex the organism, the more nuanced are the processes that have developed to aid it in this task. Our goal in retracing the experiment is to shed light on those elements of psychological experience and communication which, in keeping with the subject of this volume, might be said to exist beyond meaning. In particular, we refer to the experience and communication of non-propositional phenomena such as emotions, sensations and feelings. This is a topic of which much has recently been made in pragmatics, particularly in relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995, 2015; Wilson and Carston 2019; de Saussure and Wharton 2019; Wharton and Strey 2019), and we claim insights from Gricean creature construction are illuminating.
Inferential pragmatics is typically considered to deal exclusively with meaning that has been overtly and intentionally communicated. This paper sets out to investigate whether this established domain of enquiry can be extended to include instances of information transmission that may not be characterised by an underlying communicative intention on the part of a stimulus producer. Adopting a relevance-theoretic perspective, I argue that this can indeed be done and show how it can be quite naturally accommodated in the framework. The upshot of my argumentation in this regard is that pragmatic inference has a central role to play in interpretation even beyond the confines of what has been traditionally viewed as communication proper.
In this chapter I consider where contrastive stress fits within the relevance-theoretic model of utterance interpretation. In particular, I focus on contrastive stress as a cue to ostension which layers on top of the ostensive act of producing an utterance and which guides inferential processes. Stress patterns, however, only act as a cue to ostension when they are unexpected. It is the disconfirmation of expectations that puts the hearer to more effort and prompts the search for extra interpretive effects. The discussions in this chapter build on existing work on both prosody and pragmatics and the conclusions drawn have implications for our understanding of inferential processes, procedural meaning, and ostensive communication more generally.
This paper focuses on presupposition effects, in the light of Sperber and Wilson (2015). First, we define semantic presuppositions as determinate contents, which can in turn be instances of meaning or/and showing. A discussion is then engaged regarding the determinacy of semantic and discursive presuppositions, leading to the identification of a specific property of presuppositions, namely their contribution to the acceptance of an utterance (as per Sperber et al. 2010). The last section seeks to account for the ambivalent status of presuppositions, as they are both ostensive (i.e. triggered by an ostensive verbal stimulus) and relatively less ostensive. We conclude that a proper identification of presuppositions requires to go ‘within’ the speaker’s meaning, by adding an ‘ostensive’ and ‘less ostensive’ continuum to the showing – meaning diagram.
Preliminary evidence on non-propositional effects as indispensable to the informational content of metaphorical utterances is provided in Ifantidou (2019), Ifantidou and Hatzidaki (2019). The idea put forward was that the aesthetic apprehension of linguistic metaphors extends to enriching underdetermined aspects of propositional content.
In this paper, I further examine the distinguishing aspects of metaphors during interpretation. Following Sperber and Wilson 2015, Wilson and Carston 2019, I argue that an emotional response is triggered to the situation represented by the metaphor (see also Ifantidou 2019). I will suggest that metaphors enhance comprehension by being vehicles for emotions such as affection or dislike, as in texts which present difficulties in language comprehension. Ιn these cases, metaphors evoke non-propositional effects, such as images or emotional responses, by connecting to interpreters’ perceptions, memories, previous experiences, imagining, and beliefs. Evidence that addressees are able to derive meaning more frequently from metaphors than from literal sentences in equally supportive linguistic contexts (in terms of length, complexity, linguistic under-determinacy) attenuates the idea that metaphors enhance understanding as a merely linguistic tool, and reinforces the view that metaphorical processing involves a blend of language information with perceptual experience.
This chapter is concerned with what has traditionally been considered as ‘beyond meaning’: poetic metaphor. It specifically focuses on poetic metaphors of time, with the aim to address anew the relationship between pragmatic and cognitive linguistic approaches to metaphor (cf. Tendahl and Gibbs 2008; Wilson 2011). Such metaphors are shown to convey primarily an affective meaning, which can be best explained in terms of affective valence. At the level of metaphor comprehension, I argue for a synergy between metaphor theories but with appropriate adjustments in each framework: an extended view of encyclopedic entries for relevance theory, and a context-sensitive process of pragmatic inferencing for conceptual metaphor theory.
It’s a common intuition that literature is a special kind of language use, pursuing other aims than the mere transmission of information. This intuition is reflected in the notion that literature is art, whereas ordinary conversation is not, and that reading literature is a particular sort of experience, significant in a particular way. However, the common view in pragmatics is that literary works are not exceptional in terms of how language is used. In this paper, I discuss this issue by exploring Sperber and Wilson’s (2015) notion of ‘impressions’ and develop a tentative account of literature as triggering relevant imaginative experiences. These experiences, I argue, relate to expressivity and to affective, emotional, effects; they match readers’ expectations of relevance by means of their resonance with the individual’s own memories and imaginative experiences.
Drawing on the observation that speakers may use jokes as stylistic devices to communicate propositional meanings, this paper offers a relevance-theoretic account of pragmatic mechanisms involved in this kind of communication, dubbed ‘meaningful jokes.’ First, I argue that the comprehension of any joke not only relies on the hearer’s background knowledge, but may also lead to the modification of beliefs. Then I explore selected forms of expression which potentially bear affinity to meaningful jokes, such as fiction, metaphors, allegories, and irony. Finally, I postulate that meaningful jokes rely on a unique propositional attitude and emergent implicatures resulting from the incongruity between the joke’s scenario and a real-life situation in which it was intended to be relevant.
An ‘experience of ineffable significance’ is sudden feeling of knowing something very significant but which cannot be described in words, sometimes accompanied by chills or tears. Amongst its types are the sublime and (secular) ‘epiphanies’. Drawing on work by Huron and by Meyer, I propose that it is a type of surprise, arising from perceptions whose match to our schematic knowledge falls outside the normal range of discrepancy, either by radical discrepancy or by uncanny identity. Assuming a theoretical context of Relevance Theory, and drawing on work by Sperber and by Raffman, I explore some reasons how we are able to suddenly judge that the perception produces deeply significant knowledge, and why that knowledge cannot be expressed in words.
A challenge posed by modern art, especially since the birth of the readymade, is how it is possible to discern art from non-art; institutional theories of art suggest that institutional sanctioning is the primary condition for the identification of an object as art. Here, we propose an explanation for the way that such institutional sanctioning might be reflected in the cognitive work of a viewer, and describe this effect as part of a continuum of behaviours that generate deeper, more varied and ultimately more effort-intensive interpretations of both art and other aspects of the human experience.
The aim of this study is to shed light on the relationship between visual and verbal inputs into communication. To this end, I analysed the use of onomatopoeia as telop on Japanese TV in terms of the relevance theoretic notions of the showing-saying continuum and the definite-indefinite continuum. This analysis shows that onomatopoeia telop functions as a bridge between the verbal and non-verbal evidence in multimodal communicative acts, allowing for the interaction between different modes in terms of the distribution of intended imports in the two-dimensional view of meaning. Furthermore, this analysis, albeit in a limited manner, shows how relevance theory’s dynamic view of meaning can be successfully applied to an examination of a highly multimodal communicative act.
This chapter retraces Grice’s thought experiment on ‘creature construction’ (Grice 1975a), which attempts to show how complex psychological processes can be shown to emerge from less complex behaviours. Beginning with simple organisms, Grice’s experiment explores examines how an organism’s psychological processes work to construct representations of the surrounding environment in such a way that those representations can be utilised for survival. The more complex the organism, the more nuanced are the processes that have developed to aid it in this task. Our goal in retracing the experiment is to shed light on those elements of psychological experience and communication which, in keeping with the subject of this volume, might be said to exist beyond meaning. In particular, we refer to the experience and communication of non-propositional phenomena such as emotions, sensations and feelings. This is a topic of which much has recently been made in pragmatics, particularly in relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995, 2015; Wilson and Carston 2019; de Saussure and Wharton 2019; Wharton and Strey 2019), and we claim insights from Gricean creature construction are illuminating.