Re: RT list: On the conceptual-procedural distinction (again)

I may miss something but ...
   
  1) Given that procedural expressions 'achieve this effect by virtue of their encoded meaning and contribute their function wherever they are used as you said, I wonder in what sense do we often say and agree that procedural expressions like but, so are context-sensitive/dependent?
   
  2) Your discussion of newpaper headlines seem to apply to all sorts of expressions. That is, in one location (context may be a better choice of word), an expression may achieve these relevance optimising effects whereas in others it may have other effects.
   
  Best
  Minh
   
   
  Christoph Unger <christoph-kuelvi_unger@sil.org> wrote:
  
Newspaper headlines achieve the effect described in the quote by Dor
simply by having been used in their respective location. The same
phrases used elsewhere in another text may not have those relevance
optimising effects. Linguistic items encoding procedural information,
on the other hand, achieve this effect by virtue of their *encoded
meaning* and contribute their function wherever they are used. Whether
a given linguistic item encodes procedural meaning does not just
depend on whether the audience's relevance is optimised by its use,
but on whether the audience's relevance is optimised in virtue of what
is linguistically encoded in that item. Therefore there is a crucial
difference between newspaper headlines and linguistic items such as
`so' with regard to their contribution to relevance that must not be
overlooked.

> ...

Best,
Christoph

-- 
Dr. Christoph Unger
SIL International 
Alleestr. 7
67308 Albisheim
Germany
Phone: +49 6355 989939
       
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