Linguists, philosophers and pragmatists have tended to stay close to those areas of meaning illuminated by semantics and logic. In this chapter we suggest that relevance theory offers a solution to this limiting view. We say a little about the context in which the framework was devised, present the main tenets of the theory itself and then explain the two theoretical advances which form the basis of our belief that it is uniquely positioned to accommodate the communication of affect and emotion. The first of these is the notion of non-conceptual or procedural meaning. The second involves two key innovations in relevance theory which result in theoretical divergences from post-Gricean and Neo-Gricean approaches. In the first of these, the relevance-theoretic informative intention is not characterised as an intention to modify the hearer’s thoughts directly. In the second, relevance theory does not attempt to draw the line Grice drew between showing and meaningNN and recognises both as instances of overt intentional communication. These two innovations result in the theory’s being able to accommodate extremely vague types of communication and, further, demonstrate that communicated information - whether clock-like or cloud-like - can be shown rather than merely meantNN.

In Chapter 4, we examine how perspective taking has been conceptualized in literary studies and elements of writing style affect perspective taking by the reader. We begin with an analysis of concepts commonly associated with perspective taking, including identification and transportation. In our analysis of the effect of the text on perspective taking, we distinguish two classes of features: First-order features are those that have often been assumed to produce perspective taking, such as the use of personal pronouns, providing mental access to a character, and the use of free-indirect speech. We conclude that there is little clear evidence for a simple causal relation between such features and perspective taking by the reader. Second-order features are those that, we argue, lead to elaborative processing by the reader and thus lay the foundation for perspective-taking analogies. Such features include showing versus telling styles, textual gaps, embodied descriptions, and foregrounding. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the role of the narrator and the relation between the reader and the character.

In this chapter, we discuss how the various assumptions and principles that underlie the relevance-theoretic pragmatic framework can be applied to the pragmatic processes and inferential tasks. We begin by introducing relevance as an analytical framework that is based on key assumptions about human cognition and communication. These assumptions have consequences, and they allow us to explain and predict how utterances are interpreted. We see how these consequences play out in a range of examples that are discussed in the rest of the chapter. We start by looking at implicitly communicated meaning, before considering where we might draw the line between implicitly and explicitly communicated meaning. According to relevance theory, inference plays a role, not only in working out what a speaker is implicating, but also in working out what she is explicitly communicating. We then look in more detail at the various inferential processes that contribute to a speaker’s explicit meaning (reference assignment, disambiguation, and pragmatic enrichment), and we think about how a hearer reaches a hypothesis about the speaker’s overall intended meaning.

In this chapter, we introduce the influential work of H. Paul Grice, focusing on his claims about indirectly communicated meaning. Grice is generally acknowledged as the first person to propose an account of how hearers derive implied meaning. He coined the now widely accepted term implicature to describe any proposition that is communicated without being directly stated, and he offered an account of how hearers derive implicatures by working out what a speaker meant to communicate beyond what has been directly and explicitly stated in an utterance. We begin this chapter by exploring Grice’s distinction between ‘what is said’ and what is implicated. We then move on to discuss his cooperative principle (CP) and its associated maxims. Speakers, it is claimed, abide by certain norms when they take part in a conversation. We outline Grice’s formulation of these norms, and the role they play in inferential processes and implicature derivation. The chapter closes with a discussion of the different categories of implicature that Grice identified. We look at examples to illustrate the role that context plays in inferential processes for each category of implicature.

This chapter introduces the main concepts that are discussed in the book: communicative efficiency, costs, benefits and accessibility. It is also proposed that language users’ behaviour is guided by the Principle of Communicative Efficiency. In addition, several more specific principles and heuristics are formulated, which may explain how everyday communication can be efficient. These are three main principles: the principle of positive correlation between benefits and costs, the principle of negative correlation between accessibility and costs, and the principle of maximization of accessibility. The principles work as heuristics that make production and comprehension automatic and therefore more efficient.

This chapter focuses on relevance theory. It first introduces its main tenets, before giving a detailed presentation of the cognitive and the communicative principles of relevance. With this framework in mind, the chapter goes on to illustrate how relevance theory deals with different cases involving pragmatic enrichment. It also introduces the notion of explicature, parallel to that of implicature that was introduced in relevance theory. Finally, the chapter illustrates how some pragmatic phenomena that were previously treated as cases of implicature have been reclassified as explicatures in relevance theory.

This chapter introduces the context in which Grice presented his theory of implicatures, with special reference to speech act theory. It goes on to present Grice’s main contribution to pragmatics, detailing his principle of cooperation and presenting an overview of the different types of implicatures that he defined. Finally, the chapter presents a number of criticisms that have been levelled at his theory.

This chapter introduces the context in which Grice presented his theory of implicatures, with special reference to speech act theory. It goes on to present Grice’s main contribution to pragmatics, detailing his principle of cooperation and presenting an overview of the different types of implicatures that he defined. Finally, the chapter presents a number of criticisms that have been levelled at his theory.

This chapter starts by summarizing the predictions made by various theories of implicature that have consequences for language processing. It then presents empirical evidence bearing on a number of questions related to the processing of implicatures, namely: their processing cost, the difference between particularized and generalized implicatures, the role of mental state attribution for the derivation of implicatures, the role of politeness for the derivation of implicatures.

This chapter discusses the ability of second language learners to derive implicatures. It starts from the observation that Grice’s maxims do not seem to apply in all cultures. These cultural differences explain in part why second language learners experience difficulties with implicatures. The chapter also reviews the roles of other factors, such as the level of linguistic proficiency. The chapter also addresses the main similarities between children acquiring their first language and second language learners. One of the main differences is the existence of language transfer in the case of learners, a notion that is discussed and illustrated with respect to its relation to the phenomenon of implicatures.