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Relevance Theory (relevance + theory)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	75%

Selected Abstracts

The Relationship Between Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference

LINGUISTICS & LANGUAGE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 5 2010
David Lumsden
The distinction between speaker's and semantic reference arose in connection with Donnellan's distinction between the referential use and the attributive use of definite descriptions. The central issue concerning the referential/attributive distinction is whether it is semantic or pragmatic. Kripke favours the pragmatic interpretation and developed the terminology of speaker's and semantic reference in his explanation. The notion of speaker's reference can apply also to uses of proper names, demonstratives, indefinite descriptions and quantifier expressions. The main danger for the speaker's reference/semantic reference distinction lies in controversy over the semantics/pragmatics interface. Both Relevance Theory and neo-Gricean theory acknowledge the phenomenon of pragmatic intrusion into semantics. If the pragmatic intrusion involves objective context rather than speaker's intentions this may permit a distinction between speaker's and semantic reference. [source]

Autism, Metaphor and Relevance Theory

MIND & LANGUAGE, Issue 2 2010
CATHERINE WEARING
The pattern of impairments exhibited by some individuals on the autism spectrum appears to challenge the relevance-theoretic account of metaphor (Carston, 1996, 2002; Sperber and Wilson, 2002; Sperber and Wilson, 2008). A subset of people on the autism spectrum have near-normal syntactic, phonological, and semantic abilities while having severe difficulties with the interpretation of metaphor, irony, conversational implicature, and other pragmatic phenomena. However, Relevance Theory treats metaphor as importantly unlike phenomena such as conversational implicature or irony and like instances of ordinary literal speech. In this paper, I show how Relevance Theory can account for the prima facie incongruity between its treatment of metaphor and the case of individuals with autism. [source]

The Evolution of Relevance

COGNITIVE SCIENCE - A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, Issue 4 2010
Thomas C. Scott-Phillips
Abstract With human language, the same utterance can have different meanings in different contexts. Nevertheless, listeners almost invariably converge upon the correct intended meaning. The classic Gricean explanation of how this is achieved posits the existence of four maxims of conversation, which speakers are assumed to follow. Armed with this knowledge, listeners are able to interpret utterances in a contextually sensible way. This account enjoys wide acceptance, but it has not gone unchallenged. Specifically, Relevance Theory offers an explicitly cognitive account of utterance interpretation that presents a radical challenge to the neo-Gricean paradigm. Evolutionary considerations are one way in which we can choose between competing theories. A simple game-theoretic model of the evolution of communication is presented, and it is used to derive a number of basic qualities that will be satisfied by all evolved communication systems. These qualities are observed to precisely predict the foundational principles of Relevance Theory. The model thus provides biological support for that enterprise in general, and for the plausibility of the cognitive mechanisms that it describes in particular. [source]