Current Issues in Relevance Theory
Editors
The eleven original papers collected in this volume address themselves to some of the central issues in the relevance theoretic research programme since the 1995 publication of the second edition of Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance. Communication and Cognition.
Several papers investigate the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning in order to account for the semantics of discourse connectives, for the role of intonation in utterance interpretation, and for focus phenomena. Other papers explore the role of the relevance theoretic notion of metarepresentation in utterance interpretation and prove its usefulness in the study of both linguistic topics such as epistemic modality and conditional clauses, and in the reanalysis of literary issues such as verbal humour.
Some of the central pragmatic issues dealt with are the interpretation of semantically underdetermined linguistic forms, the role and nature of pragmatic inference, the distinction between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning and the separation between explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning. The theory’s application to sociolinguistic topics is assessed and developed in an inspired account of phatic communication; and the theory’s usefulness in accounting for certain types of “grammatical” constraints is explored in relation to certain restrictions in the interpretation of indefinite descriptions.
Several papers investigate the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning in order to account for the semantics of discourse connectives, for the role of intonation in utterance interpretation, and for focus phenomena. Other papers explore the role of the relevance theoretic notion of metarepresentation in utterance interpretation and prove its usefulness in the study of both linguistic topics such as epistemic modality and conditional clauses, and in the reanalysis of literary issues such as verbal humour.
Some of the central pragmatic issues dealt with are the interpretation of semantically underdetermined linguistic forms, the role and nature of pragmatic inference, the distinction between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning and the separation between explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning. The theory’s application to sociolinguistic topics is assessed and developed in an inspired account of phatic communication; and the theory’s usefulness in accounting for certain types of “grammatical” constraints is explored in relation to certain restrictions in the interpretation of indefinite descriptions.
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 58] 1998. xii, 368 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 26 July 2011
Published online on 26 July 2011
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
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Acknowledgements | p. vii
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List of Contributors | p. ix
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IntroductionVilly Rouchota and Andreas H. Jucker | p. 1
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Connectives, Coherence and RelevanceVilly Rouchota | p. 11
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Because and although: A Case of Duality?Corinne Iten | p. 59
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Conceptual and Procedural Encoding: Cause-consequence Conjunctive Particles in JapaneseMichiko Takeuchi | p. 81
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Interface Economy and FocusRichard Breheny | p. 105
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A Relevance-Theoretic Account of the Property Predification RestrictionManuel Leonetti | p. 141
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Intonation and Procedural Encoding: The Case of Spanish InterrogativesM. Victoria Escandell-Vidal | p. 169
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Intonation and the Procedural Encoding of Attributed Thoughts: The Case of Norwegian Negative InterrogativesThorstein Fretheim | p. 205
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Modality and Semantic UnderdterminacyAnna Papafragou | p. 237
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A Relevance-theoretic Account of Metarepresentative Uses in ConditionalsEun-Ju Noh | p. 271
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Indirect Echoes and verbal HumourCarmen Curcó | p. 305
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What is “Phatic Communication”?Vladimir Zegarac | p. 327
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Index | p. 363
“[...] this volume is a very interesting collection of papers which show the extent to which RT has developed and matured in the last few years. The papers shed light on the role inference plays in comprehension, and contribute significantly to a better understanding of how language is processed.”
Francisco Yus, University of Alicante, Spain, in Journal of Pragmatics 32, 2000
“[...] this book is a valuable presentation of current trends in relevance theory. It enables us to see that relevance theory can describe aspects that other approaches can not explain adequately. Moreover, the application has been extended to the analysis of linguistic phenomena in languages other than English, like Japanese, Spanish and Norwegian. This book should be useful both to experienced researchers in relevance theory, and to those who are interested in a cognitive approach to verbal communication.”
Xinzhang Yang, Xiamen University, China
Cited by (11)
Cited by 11 other publications
Naji Abed, Asst. Lect. Safa & Prof. Dr. Salih Mahdi Adai AlMamoory
Nicolle, Steve
2022. Communicated and non-communicated acts in relevance theory. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 233 ff.
Colantoni, Laura & Liliana Sánchez
Yuan, Wen, Francis Y. Lin & Richard P. Cooper
Padilla Cruz, Manuel
2016. Three decades of relevance theory. In Relevance Theory [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 268], ► pp. 1 ff.
Xie, Chaoqun
2003. Review of Noh (2000): Metarepresentation. A Relevance-theory Approach. Studies in Language 27:1 ► pp. 171 ff.
Dryer, Matthew S., Vit Bubenik, Axel Fleisch, Leoma Gilley, Anthony P. Grant, Alan S. Kaye, Alan S. Kaye, Ursula Lenker, Donna L. Lillian, Nick Nicholas, Bert Peeters, Kanavillil Rajagopalan, Solomon I. Sara, J. J. Spa, Yuri Tambovtsev, Edward J. Vajda, Edward J. Vajda, Xinzhang Yang & Xinzhang Yang
Fretheim, Thorstein
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
Subjects
Main BIC Subject
CF: Linguistics
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General