Recent work in Relevance Theory (henceforth RT) illustrates the coming of
age of modern pragmatic scholarship in creating an environment in which a
particular theory of pragmatics can be taken for granted, without explanation
or justification, and an analysis of a phenomenon previously unaccounted for
within that theory can be advanced. One is reminded of much of the recent
syntactic work within GB/Principles & Parameters/Minimalist Theory: the
dominance of the Chomskyan approach – particularly in certain geographic
regions – allows researchers, for better or worse, to simply assume the
correctness of the theory in their work and proceed to illustrate how that
theory might (or must) be extended or modified to accommodate a new class
of data. In this volume, Žegarac & Clark (1999) provide the latest illustration
of a similar strategy in pragmatics: the correctness of RT is assumed and an
analysis of ‘phatic communication’ proposed within that framework. On the
one hand, this constitutes an advance for pragmatic theory, since until
recently there was no comprehensive all-inclusive framework within which
certain pragmatic generalizations could be stated. If nothing else, RT has
served to raise a number of important issues surrounding the semantics-pragmatics interface, helping to crystallize the debate and make explicit
many assumptions that had been either implicit or non-existent in other
frameworks. In particular, RT work on scalar implicature/explicature and
on echoic mention and metalinguistic negation (e.g. Carston 1988, 1995;
Récanati 1989) has represented major advances in our understanding of
these phenomena and their theoretical implications. Thus, whatever one may
think of RT, it is a theory that must be taken seriously by anyone working
in this area. On the other hand, we find that RT suffers from one of the
principal afflictions of the aforementioned work in the GB/P&P/Minimalism
mainstream: a remarkable failure to address, come to terms with, and
incorporate the extensive previous literature on the topic under current
consideration.
