Many thanks to Marina Terkourafi for her recent analysis. Here are some
rejoinders:
Where Marina writes:
> > Both examples cited,
> >
> > (1) "The Melvin Hall dormitory is on fire."
> > (2) "The dean wishes to speak with you."
> >
> > amount to requests for the addressee to do something (e.g. "Do
> > something about putting the fire out" in case (1), "Go and see the
> > dean" in case (2)).
This is true, and her analysis follows up on that in some very interesting
directions. It is not actually why I chose those examples. (Nice topic,
though, exploring how likely the 'request reading' is in various
circumstances, and how that correlates with stereotyped expressions, etc.)
What I want to suggest, and failed to make clear, was based on the hearer's
options, regardless of what the utterer might have intended.
For any utterance, the hearer is going to spend some amount of processing
effort. Now, many utterances will have this property: the more processing
effort spent by the hearer, the more "results" the hearer obtains (in the
form of new realizations, new cognitive connections, new interactions with
existing assumptions, raised or lowered values placed on other ideas, etc.)
Suppose we call the processing event itself P. At some point or points,
either prior to P or during P, we know that the interpretation process is
influenced by such things as the hearer's feelings about the utterer, the
power with which the utterance was delivered, the outside circumstances in
which the utterance was made, etc. I want to know, where and when and how
do those influential factors interact with P? If relevance theory includes
a notion of how P proceeds, then it should presumably also have a notion of
where these other factors can impact upon P, as we know they must.
If I think that the utterer is an idiot, and has just drunk a lot of
alcohol, and only tentatively put forward an utterance, and I'm sleepy, then
we know, do we not, that I am going to spend a lot less processing effort on
the utterance than if the utterer were my leader, is giving expert testimony
in front of an important committee, and is speaking with firm conviction,
and I'm wide awake.
To capture this intuition, we would want to say that these factors are taken
into account by the hearer, either as a cognitive "preprocess" in deciding
how much processing effort to invest, or during the processing itself, as
some kind of filter or "colorer" of the results being obtaied as P proceeds.
I wonder if there is evidence, or even theory, of how this operates, how
these factors are taken into account.
Hanno Beck
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