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Article published In:
Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 29:1 (2022) ► pp.1–28

Ad hoc concepts, affective attitude and epistemic stance

| Universidad de Sevilla

In relevance-theoretic pragmatics the lower-level or first-order explicature is a propositional form resulting from a series of inferential developments of the logical form. It amounts to the message the speaker communicates explicitly. The higher-level or second-order explicature is a description of the speech act that the speaker performs, her affective attitude towards what she says or her epistemic stance to the communicated information. Information about the speaker’s affective attitude or epistemic stance need not solely be represented in the latter, though. It could be included as beliefs in the mental files of pragmatically adjusted conceptual representations featuring in lower-level explicatures. Those beliefs would originate as lexical pragmatic processes operate and their representation would be triggered by elements like evaluative morphemes, expressive expletives, insulting terms and evidential participles. Although they may be true or false in their own right, such beliefs would not affect the truth-conditional content of the expressed proposition.

Keywords: relevance theory, explicit content, attitudinal representation, evaluative morphemes, expressive expletives, insulting terms, evidential participles
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Explicit meaning
  • 3.Lexical adjustment and psychological states
    • 3.1Evaluative morphology and ad hoc concepts
    • 3.2Expressive expletives, ad hoc concepts and psychological states
    • 3.3Offensive terms and lexical pragmatic processes
    • 3.4Evidential participles, lexical pragmatics and belief states
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.20002.pad
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