Article published in:
Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 26:2/3 (2019) ► pp. 215–238

Poly-procedural meaning and rhetoric

The case of afu in Modern Greek

| Aristotle University of Thessaloniki , Greece
The current paper aims to explore the meaning of one of the most elusive discourse markers in Modern Greek rhetorical discourse: afu. To address the challenge of a thorough and parsimonious account, the relevance-theoretic model of meaning analysis is deployed. The analysis undertaken ultimately reveals that the marker at hand encodes procedural meaning in standard relevance-theoretic terms. However, unlike traditional relevance-theoretic approaches linking a marker to a single procedural function, the current one proposes that afu encodes a poly-procedural constraint on the implicated content of the utterance containing the marker. Moreover, it is argued that this poly-procedural constraint is rhetorically exploited by the speaker in the interest of convincing argumentation.
Keywords: discourse markers, procedural meaning, relevance theory, rhetoric, non-truth-conditional meaning, mutual manifestness
Published online: 12 February 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.19021.bar
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