Poly-procedural meaning and rhetoric
The case of afu in Modern Greek
Valandis Bardzokas | 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
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Rhetorical afu and its co-textual varieties
- 3.
Afu: Some preliminary remarks
- 3.1Epistemic and backgrounding functions
- 4.Relevance theory
- 4.1Mutual cognitive environment
- 4.2Discourse markers and procedural meaning
- 5.Rhetorical afu: A procedural marker
- 5.1 Afu’s dual constraint on implicitly communicated content
- 5.2The rhetorical use of afu
- 5.3A parsimonious account of rhetorical afu
- 6.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
Published online: 12 February 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.19021.bar
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.19021.bar
References
References
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Bardzokas, Valandis
Carston, Robyn
Comrie, Bernard
Goutsos, Dionysis
Iten, Corinne
Kalokerinos, Alexis
Kitis, Eliza
Kriaras, Emmanuel
Lakoff, Robyn
Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson
Stavropoulos, Dimitrios
Sweetser, Eve
Tzartzanos, Achilleas
Wilson, Deirdre