My thanks to Steve and also RJS for their replies. They clarified much that
had been unclear for me.
If we are agreed that social factors are taken into account during the
interpretation of an utterance event, then how exactly does that operate?
Does relevance theory have a model for what might actually be happening
cognitively inside the interpreter when social factors are involved?
For example -- suppose an unreliable person says "The dean wishes to speak
with you" to John. John receives a mixture of ostensive and
social/non-ostensive inputs, and one of the non-ostensive inputs is John's
awareness that the speaker is unreliable.
Possibility A. (two stages -- interpret and weigh) John goes ahead and
processes an interpretation, without regard for the speaker's reliability.
Then, at the end, he diminishes the importance of each piece of implicature
resulting from the interpretation, perhaps multiplying each bit by 0.25
because of the unreliability of the speaker.
Possibility B. (one stage -- interpret) John mixes ostensive and
non-ostensive information into a single basket, and processes an
interpretation based on everything known to him.
Possibility C. (two stages -- weigh and interpret) John weighs the
speaker's reliability (and other factors) first. Based on this, he
"decides" how much energy to allocate toward the effort of interpreting the
utterance. If the speaker is unreliable, or if the speaker is hard to
understand, or if the speaker is of a different racial background, perhaps
John might choose to allocate no energy, or only some percentage of the
usual amount of energy, that he would spend on interpreting a typical
utterance.
Is relevance theory committed to one of these views, or some other?
I suspect that there may be empirical evidence already known (but not by me,
that's for sure!) that makes some of these possibilties more likely than
others.
Hanno Beck
banneker@progress.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Oct 06 2004 - 22:00:42 GMT