Dear all,
I've been on the Relevance list for while, and thought that a (belated) introduction was in order.
My name is Tim WHARTON (despite the name accompanying the message), and I'm a year into my thesis with Deirdre Wilson at UCL.
I'm interested in some of the vaguer aspects of communication, which I am characterising (at the moment) in terms of the difference between 'showing' and 'saying', where showing is relatively natural behaviour, and saying is properly linguistic. Since in ostensive-inferential communication an act of saying is a special case of showing, there is presumably a great deal of interaction between the two, and, as Sperber and Wilson suggest, a continuum of cases in between.
I'm also interested in the implications such a continuum might have if seen from an evolutionary perspective, that is diachronically as well as synchronically. There seems to be a point of contact between, for example, Grice's discussion of 'natural' meaning (which includes within it behaviours we might want to characterise as instances of showing) and the evolutionary literature on spontaneous human expression of emotion (in particular, Darwin).
As well as the relationship between showing and saying, and natural and non-natural meaning, I'm also currently looking at issues such as the conceptual-procedural distinction, and digital and analog coding. Certain interjections which may not be a part of language proper and pattern with analog paralinguistic phenomena, appear to be better analysed as encoding procedural meaning. This may not only have implications for analyses of interjections, but might also affect how we come to view procedural meaning.
I look forward to hearing from you: please feel free to contact me on my home e-mail 'tim@tcody.freeserve.co.uk' or my UCL account 't.wharton@ucl.ac.uk'.
Thanks for reading,
Tim.
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