Relevance Theory

The definitive introduction to relevance theory, starting from the basics and covering all its key ideas.

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.

This collection of papers arises from a meeting of relevance theorists held in Osaka, May 29-30, 1993. Speakers at the conference included both of the originators of the theory, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, the editors of this volume and several other Japanese linguists and pragmatists, all of whose work is included. The full breadth and richness of relevance theory is represented here, both in its applications to problems of utterance interpretation, that fall squarely within the domain of pragmatics, and its implications for linguistic semantics. Several papers investigate and assess the theory’s account of figurative uses of language, such as irony, metaphor and metonymy. Other central pragmatic issues include a relevance-driven account of generalized implicature, the role of bridging implicatures in reference assignment, the way in which different intonation patterns contribute to the relevance of an utterance and the application of the theory to literary texts. The recently developed semantic distinction between conceptually and procedurally encoded meaning, motivated by relevance-theoretic considerations, is employed in new accounts of several Japanese particles and in a fresh perspective on the phenomenon of metalinguistic negation. The volume comes with a comprehensive glossary of relevance-theoretic terms.

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.

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.

The eleven original papers collected in this volume address themselves to some of the central issues in the relevance theoretic research programme since the 1995 publication of the second edition of Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance. Communication and Cognition. Several papers investigate the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning in order to account for the semantics of discourse connectives, for the role of intonation in utterance interpretation, and for focus phenomena. Other papers explore the role of the relevance theoretic notion of metarepresentation in utterance interpretation and prove its usefulness in the study of both linguistic topics such as epistemic modality and conditional clauses, and in the reanalysis of literary issues such as verbal humour. Some of the central pragmatic issues dealt with are the interpretation of semantically underdetermined linguistic forms, the role and nature of pragmatic inference, the distinction between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning and the separation between explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning. The theory’s application to sociolinguistic topics is assessed and developed in an inspired account of phatic communication; and the theory’s usefulness in accounting for certain types of “grammatical” constraints is explored in relation to certain restrictions in the interpretation of indefinite descriptions.

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.