Relevance theory : recent developments, current challenges and future directions / edited by Manuel Padilla Cruz.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Padilla Cruz, Manuel, editor.

Series:

Pragmatics & beyond companion series.

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 0922-842X

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Relevance.

Pragmatics.

Inference.

Cognition.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (335 pages).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam, [Netherlands] ; Philadelphia, [Pennsylvania] : John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2016.

Summary:

How hearers arrive at intended meaning, which elements encode processing instructions in certain languages, how procedural meaning and prosody interact, how diverse types of utterances are interpreted, how epistemic vigilance mechanisms work, which linguistic elements assist those mechanisms, how a critical attitude to information and informers develops when a second language is learnt, or why some perlocutionary effects originate are some of the varied issues that have intrigued pragmatists, and relevance theorists in particular, and continue to fuel research. In this collection readers will discover new proposals based on the cognitive framework put forward by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson three decades ago. Their gripping, insightful and stimulating discussions, combined in some cases with meticulous and in-depth analyses, show the directions relevance theory has recently followed. Moreover, this collection also unveils fruitful and promising interactions with areas like morphology, prosody, language typology, interlanguage pragmatics, machine translation, or rhetoric and argumentation, and avenues for future research.

Contents:

Intro

Relevance Theory

Editorial page

Title page

LCC data

Table of contents

Introduction: Three decades of relevance theory

1. The relevance-theoretic revolution

2. Research within relevance-theoretic pragmatics

3. This book

References

Part I. Issues on procedural meaning and procedural analyses

The speaker's derivational intention

1. Introduction

2. Procedural indicators differ in strength

3. Optimal and non-optimal stimuli

4. Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Cracking the chestnut: How intonation interacts with procedural meaning in Colloquial Singapore Engl

2. Discourse particles in CSE

3. Previous characterisations of lah

4. A relevance-theoretic characterisation of lah

5. The effect of intonation contour on lah

6. Conclusion

Reference assignment in pronominal argument languages: A relevance-theoretic perspective

2. Conceptual and procedural distinction in relevance theory

3. Pronominal languages in syntactic theory

4. Pragmatic disambiguation of nominal descriptions in discourse

5. Identificational and contrastive focus in reference assignment

Conceptual and procedural information for verb tense disambiguation: The English Simple Past

2. Classical descriptions

3. Contrastive analysis of the SP

4. Relevance-theoretic framework

5. Annotation experiments

6. Application to statistical machine translation systems

7. Discussion and conclusion

Corpora references

Part II. Discourse issues

Relevance theory and contextual sources-centred analysis of irony: Current research and compatibilit

1. Introduction: Relevance-theoretic claims on irony

2. Source of the echo and dissociative attitude.

3. Contextual inappropriateness triggers ironic interpretation

4. Dual-stage processing? Direct-access view? Graded salience hypothesis?

5. Metarepresentations and the interpretation of irony

Distinguishing rhetorical from ironical questions: A relevance-theoretic account

2. Common views on ironical and rhetorical questions

3. Common and distinct properties

4. Inferences in rhetorical and ironical questions

5. Implications for a theory of irony in general

Part III. Interpretive processes

Relevance theory, epistemic vigilance and pragmatic competence

2. "Analysis", "control" and pragmatic inference

3. Relevance and epistemic vigilance

4. From theory to application

5. The data

6. Results

7. Discussion

8. Conclusion

Appendix

Evidentials, genre and epistemic vigilance

2. Evidentials as genre indicators

3. The semantics of evidentials

4. The pragmatics of traditional stories

5. Reported evidentials, argumentation and narratives

Part IV. Rhetorical and perlocutionary effects of communication

Rhetoric and cognition: Pragmatic constraints on argument processing

2. Rhetoric and cognition

3. Understanding as a fast and frugal heuristic

4. Constraints on argument processing

5. Conclusion

Perlocutionary effects and relevance theory

2. Defining perlocutionary acts and effects

3. Speech act issues and RT

4. Why deal with other perlocutions

5. Intuitions about threatening, joking, and offending

6. Psychology of cognitions and emotions

7. Conclusion

References.

Some directions for future research in relevance-theoretic pragmatics

1. Procedural meaning

2. Discourse issues

3. Interpretive processes

4. Effects of communication

5. Too soon to conclude

Contributors

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references at the end of each chapters and index.

Description based on print version record.