Relevance Theoretic Lexical Pragmatics

This volume is one of the first books to present a comprehensive view of lexical pragmatics, describing its origins, assumptions, scope, methodology and the various approaches to it, focusing specifically on the approach offered by relevance theory. In addition to theoretical considerations, the book discusses particular linguistic expressions and pragmatic phenomena, showing how the relevance-theoretic tools may be used to explore pragmatically motivated changes to lexically encoded meanings. The most recent developments are discussed and questions are asked to indicate directions for further research within this rapidly developing field.

This volume is one of the first books to present a comprehensive view of lexical pragmatics, describing its origins, assumptions, scope, methodology and the various approaches to it, focusing specifically on the approach offered by relevance theory. In addition to theoretical considerations, the book discusses particular linguistic expressions and pragmatic phenomena, showing how the relevance-theoretic tools may be used to explore pragmatically motivated changes to lexically encoded meanings. The most recent developments are discussed and questions are asked to indicate directions for further research within this rapidly developing field.

The collection of papers discusses various applications of Relevance Theory within several areas of pragmatics and discourse analysis. It covers an array of topics, including the treatment of figurative language, pragmatic markers and lexical pragmatics within Relevance Theory. It also discusses relevance-theoretic analyses of special kinds of discourse, such as discourse emerging from the internet or from psychotherapeutic sessions. The volume will primarily interest relevance theorists and scholars working on the subjects addressed by particular chapters.

The present volume covers a variety of topics which are at the centre of interest in pragmatic research: understanding and believing, reference, politeness, communication problems, stylistics, metaphor, and humour. Next to innovative theoretical proposals, there are interesting analyses and discussions.

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.

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Other, grade: 2,7, RWTH Aachen University (Institut für Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Romanistik der RWTH Aachen), language: English, abstract: Over time, pragmatics played an increasingly important role in different areas of language study. A particularly interesting instance of language use in this matter is translation. Thus, the decision to discuss the relation between pragmatics and translation came up. More precisely, the influence of a specific pragmatic field, namely Relevance Theory, on the study of translation will be analyzed below. It begins with a brief look into the history of translation studies and the reason why it is possible for pragmatic concepts to be applied to the study of translation. The most fundamental concept in connection to the respective study is Relevance Theory which was developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. A general overview of the theory will introduce the examination of this part of the research. It is mostly based on Sperber and Wilson’s work Relevance: Communication & Cognition (1995). Which role the relevance-theoretic notion plays with regard to translation will then be studied. In terms of translation and relevance, the efforts of Ernst-August Gutt are of major interest with his book Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context (2000) being of primary attention. This chapter will furthermore focus on a few selected relevance-theoretic concepts. It starts with the notion of optimal relevance and continues with investigating the interpretive use of language in translation. Finally, my goal is to make use of the relevance-theoretic approach to translation by applying the respective concepts to an example. This will be the core area of the paper. The analysis is made up of scrutinizing a translated version of an online newspaper article from the UK edition of the Huffington Post with German as the target language. The article is about the British author J.K Rowling criticizing a supporter of the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, better known as Brexit, in a referendum.

The collection of papers discusses various applications of Relevance Theory within several areas of pragmatics and discourse analysis. It covers an array of topics, including the treatment of figurative language, pragmatic markers and lexical pragmatics within Relevance Theory. It also discusses relevance-theoretic analyses of special kinds of discourse, such as discourse emerging from the internet or from psychotherapeutic sessions. The volume will primarily interest relevance theorists and scholars working on the subjects addressed by particular chapters.

Showcases recent research by leading scholars working within the relevance-theoretic pragmatics framework.