Dear All,
As a beginner in Relevance Theory, reading Wilson's and Sperber's book
"Relevance: Communication and Cogntion" (1986) for the first time is
illuminating, yet soemtimes confusing. I am currently working on the English
modal verbs in a corpus of political speeches and press conferences. So I am
constantly trying to find links between the theory and application. Here is
a question for the experts.
As I have read, it seems that the book is intrinsically interested in two
notions that do not entirely fit my investigation. These are: reciprocal
communication and spontaneous inference. Non-reciprocal communication in a
situation where the speaker assumes authority (my work exactly) is only
particularly mentioned (Ch. 1 p. 63) as being automatically mutually
manifest. Then it is argued (Ch. 2 p. 75) that when a representation is
stored in the mind by being embedded under an expression of attitude (the
case of the modals) it is often processed in a self-conscious,
non-spontaneous way which apparently is not the focus of the book since it
represents a minority. So my question is: how do these two facts bear on a
study of the modals in a corpus of non-reciprocal communication? Are the
rules for non-spontaneous inference much different than those of spontaneous
inference? How different? Also, how is the process of utterance
interpretation in a non-reciprocal communication different from the case in
normal reciprocal communication from the viewpoint of relevance theory?
Finally, I would like a hint as to the best reference to consult for looking
up cognitive science terms, such as deduction, induction, etc. If anyone
knows of an online source please let me know.
I would really appreciate your thoughts on this.
Thanks to you all.
Mai
***********************************
Mai Zaki
B.A. English Langauge and Literature
English Department, Faculty of Languages
Ain Shams University
Cairo, Egypt
_________________________________________________________________
STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Aug 17 2003 - 23:31:59 GMT