Concepts and context in relevance-theoretic pragmatics: New developments
Publication history
Table of contents
Overall, this special issue is to be situated within relevance-theoretic pragmatics (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995; Wilson and Sperber 2002, 2004, 2012), the cognitive framework that seeks to explain why, out of the various interpretations of an utterance which are compatible with what is encoded in its linguistic form, the hearer ends up selecting but just one of them and thinking that it is the interpretation that the speaker intends to communicate. However, in addition to showcasing some of relevance theorists’ current concerns, recent research, and latest developments, this special issue chiefly aims to celebrate the most valuable contribution to this framework and its subsequent evolution made by one of its proponents and founding scholars: Professor Deirdre Wilson. During her most fruitful and illuminating career, she has been an active member of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) and has been well known for her interest in a variety of pragmatics-related topics, which include procedural meaning, lexical pragmatics, figurative language, literary communication, non-propositional effects or metarepresentational abilities, to name but some.
References
Barsalou, Lawrence W.
1983 “Ad Hoc Categories.” Memory & Cognition 11: 211–227. 
Blakemore, Diane
1987 Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
1992 Understanding Utterances. An Introduction to Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell.
2002 Relevance and Linguistic Meaning. The Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carston, Robyn
1997 “Enrichment and Loosening: Complementary Processes in Deriving the Proposition Expressed.” Linguistiche Berichte 8: 103–127.
2000 “Explicature and Semantics.” UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 12: 1–44.
2002a Thoughts and Utterances. The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
2002b “Metaphor, Ad Hoc Concepts and Word Meaning – More Questions than Answers.” UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 14: 83–105.
2010 “Lexical Pragmatics, Ad Hoc Concepts and Metaphor: From a Relevance Theory Perspective.” Italian Journal of Linguistics 22 (1): 153–180.
2012 “Metaphor and the Literal/Nonliteral Distinction.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Keith Allan, and Kasia M. Jaszczolt, 469–492. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2013 “Word Meaning, What Is Said and Explicature.” In What Is Said and What Is Not, ed. by Carlo Penco, and Filippo Domaneschi, 175–204. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
2016 “The Heterogeneity of Procedural Meaning.” Lingua 175–176: 154–166.
Carston, Robyn, and Catherine Wearing
2011 “Metaphor, Hyperbole and Simile: A Pragmatic Approach.” Language and Cognition 3 (2): 283–312.
de Saussure, Louis
2012 “Temporal Reference in Discourse.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Keith Allan, and Kasia Jaszczolt, 423–446. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2022 “Pragmatic Resolutions of Temporal and Aspectual Mismatches.” Pragmatics & Cognition 28 (2): 228–251.
Falkum, Ingrid L.
2019 “Metaphor and Metonymy in Acquisition: A Relevance Theoretic Perspective.” In Relevance: Pragmatics and Interpretation, ed. by Kate Scott, Robyn Carston, and Billy Clark, 205–217. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fodor, Jerry A.
1983 The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Grice, Herbert P.
1975 “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole, and Jerry Morgan, 41–59. New York: Academic Press.
Grisot, Cristina, Bruno Cartoni, and Jacques Moeschler
2016 “Conceptual and Procedural Information for Verb Tense Disambiguation: The English Simple Past.” In Relevance Theory. Recent Developments, Current Challenges and Future Directions, ed. by Manuel Padilla Cruz, 103–143. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hall, Alison
2007 “Do Discourse Connectives Encode Concepts or Procedures?” Lingua 117 (1): 149–174.
2011 “Ad Hoc Concepts: Atomic or Decompositional.” UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 23: 1–10.
2017 “Lexical Pragmatics, Explicature and Ad Hoc Concepts.” In Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line, ed. by Ilse Depraetere, and Raphael Salkie, 55–100. Cham: Springer.
Jary, Mark
2016 “Rethinking Explicit Utterance Content.” Journal of Pragmatics 102: 24–37.
Jucker, Andreas H.
1993 “The Discourse Marker Well: A Relevance-theoretical Account.” Journal of Pragmatics 19 (5): 435–452.
Moeschler, Jacques
2016 “Where Is Procedural Meaning Located? Evidence from Discourse Connectives and Tenses.” Lingua 175–176: 122–138.
Padilla Cruz, Manuel
2019 “Qualifying Insults, Offensive Epithets, Slurs and Expressive Expletives: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 7 (2): 156–181.
2020 “Towards a Relevance-Theoretic Approach to the Diminutive Morpheme.” Russian Journal of Linguistics 24 (4): 774–795.
2022a “Is Free Enrichment Always Free? Revisiting Ad Hoc-Concept Construction.” Journal of Pragmatics 187: 130–143.
2022b “On the Interpretation of Utterances with Expressive Expletives.” Pragmatics & Cognition 28 (2): 252–276.
Scott, Kate
2011 “Beyond Reference: Concepts, Procedures and Referring Expressions.” In Procedural Meaning: Problems and Perspectives, ed. by Victoria Escandell Vidal, Manuel Leonetti, and Aoife Ahern, 183–203. Bingley: Emerald.
2013 “This and That: A Procedural Analysis.” Lingua 131: 49–65.
2016 “Pronouns and Procedures: Reference and Beyond.” Lingua 175–176: 69–82.
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson
1986 Relevance. Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
1995 Relevance. Communication and Cognition, 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell.
1998 “The Mapping between the Mental and the Public Lexicon.” In Language and Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes, ed. by Peter Carruthers, and Jill Boucher, 184–200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2008 “A Deflationary Account of Metaphors.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, ed. by Raymond W. Gibbs, 84–105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wałaszeska, Ewa
2011 “Broadening and Narrowing in Lexical Development: How Relevance Theory Can Account for Children’s Overextensions and Underextensions.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (1): 314–326.
Wilson, Deirdre
2004 “Relevance and Lexical Pragmatics.” UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 16: 343–360.
2011a “Procedural Meaning: Past, Present, Future.” In Procedural Meaning: Problems and Perspectives, ed. by Victoria Escandell Vidal, Manuel Leonetti, and Aoife Ahern, 3–31. Bingley: Emerald.
2011b “Parallels and Differences in the Treatment of Metaphor in Relevance Theory and Cognitive Linguistics.” Intercultural Pragmatics 8 (2): 177–196.
2012 “Modality and the Conceptual–Procedural Distinction.” In Relevance Theory: More than Understanding, ed. by Ewa Wałaszewska, and Agnieszka Piskorska, 23–43. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Wilson, Deirdre, and Robyn Carston
2006 “Metaphor, Relevance and the ‘Emergent Property’ Issue.” Mind & Language 21 (3): 404–433.
2007 “A Unitary Approach to Lexical Pragmatics: Relevance, Inference and Ad Hoc Concepts.” In Pragmatics, ed. by Noel Burton-Roberts, 230–259. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Wilson, Deirdre
2016 “Reassessing the Conceptual-Procedural Distinction.” Lingua 175–176: 5–19.
Wilson, Deirdre, and Dan Sperber
1993 “Linguistic Form and Relevance.” Lingua 90 (1): 1–25.
2002 “Relevance Theory.” UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 14: 249–287.
2004 “Relevance Theory.” In The Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Larry Horn, and Gregory Ward, 607–632. Oxford: Blackwell.
2012 Meaning and Relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.