Dear All,
Reading Wilson's and Sperber's "Relevance: Communication and Cogntion"
(1986) it seems that the book is intrinsically interested in two notions:
reciprocal communication and spontaneous inference.
Non-reciprocal communication in a situation where the speaker assumes
authority (my area of interest) 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 (which could be applied to utterances with modal
verbs) it is often processed in a self-conscious, non-spontaneous way.
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? 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
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English Department, Faculty of Languages
Ain Shams University, Egypt
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