RE: RT list: relevance theory and discourse?

Dear all,

It seems to me that the notion of indeterminacy due to weak communication
takes care of most of these concerns about the open-endedness of intended
interpretations. Beyond the matter of intended interpretation there is then,
of course, the matter of further possible inferences triggered by the
cognitive principle of relevance. (In fact, the cognitive principle of
relevance sometimes seems to interfere with the recovery of the
communicator's intended interpretation: the addressee may go off on a
tangent following a track of inferences that appear to him/her of higher
relevance than the information offered by the communicator.)

Best wishes,
Ernst-August Gutt

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk
> [mailto:owner-relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk] On Behalf Of
> Dr K.M. Jaszczolt
> Sent: 28 January 2009 09:26
> To: Louis de Saussure
> Cc: Christoph Unger; Mai Zaki; relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: RT list: relevance theory and discourse?
>
> Dear all,
>
> Relevance and discourse meaning were indeed widely discussed
> in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the idea of
> 'constructing the context' as presented in RT was new and
> controversial. I agree with Louis that what has to be
> remembered is that the recovery of the speaker's intentions
> does not necessarily equal the recovery of the speaker's
> assumptions: there are open-ended texts and discourses where
> the addressee is free/encouraged to go beyond the recovery of
> intentions. I wrote a paper on this a long time ago,
> 'Relevance and Infinity: Implications for discourse interpretation'
> (Journal of Pragmatics 25, 1996), comparing the ideas of RT
> and Levinas's Totality and Infinity in order to answer the
> questions posed in S&W
> 1986/96: (i) how assumption schemas are worked out and (ii)
> what determines the orer of accessibility of hypotheses. I
> suggested a doubly-dynamic process of context construction,
> where assumptions are not only recovered through intention
> recognition but also created (or, on an analogous construal,
> recovered but are of the form of instructions to the
> addressee to decide what the meaning should be). How to
> represent this meaning in a contextualist framework
> (truth-conditional pragmatics, intrusionist semantics, and so
> forth), and even what meaning to represent, are still open
> and widely discussed questions in the semantics/pragmatics
> debates, especially as regards its possible formalization.
>
> With best wishes to all,
> Kasia
>
> -- Dr K.M. Jaszczolt, Reader in Linguistics and Philosophy of
> Language, Department of Linguistics, MML, University of
> Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DA, and Newnham
> College, Cambridge CB3 9DA, United Kingdom tel. +44 1223
> 335744; fax +44 1223 335053;
> http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/~kmj21
>
> Forthcoming in February 2009 from Oxford University Press:
> Representing
> Time: An Essay on Temporality as Modality.
> http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199214440&view=00&prom
> o=webling08&salepage=%2Fsale%2Fwebling08%2F
>
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Received on Wed Jan 28 13:05:58 2009