Online relevance theory course

Provisional syllabus

There are ten units or ‘lectures’
Here are the topics they cover:

1) Introduction to pragmatics

What is pragmatics?
The gap between speaker meaning and sentence meaning
Context
Communication and understanding

2) Gricean pragmatics

Previous theories of communication
Grice’s theory
The Cooperative Principle and Maxims
Questions about Grice’s approach

3) Relevance and cognition

Defining relevance
Cognitive effects, processing effort
Relevance-oriented cognition

4) Relevance and communication

Predicting and manipulating mental states
Expectations of relevance
Comparisons with Grice

5) Pragmatics and relevance

Some consequences of relevance theory
What does the definition of optimal relevance imply?

6) Disambiguation

Accessibility of condidate senses
Acceptability of candidate disambiguations
Comparison of truth-based, coherence-based and relevance-based approaches

7) The explicit and the implicit

The nature of explicit communication

The nature of implicit communication
A relevance-theoretic account of implicit communication
Relevance theory and communication

8) Where does irony come from?

Problems with the classical and Gricean accounts of irony
Irony as echoic interpretive use
Some criticisms of the relevance-theoretic account

9) Loose talk, metaphor and hyperbole

Metaphor, hyperbole and the maxim of truthfulness
The exploitation of resemblances in communication
Examples and implications