Some early critiques of RT claimed that RT is essentially asocial, and
therefore incapable of dealing with the issue which Hanno Beck raised.
Although some of the RT literature might give this impression, I do not
think that RT is necessarily asocial. I wrote an article (Nicolle, S. 2000.
Communicated and non-communicated acts in relevance theory. Pragmatics 10:
233-245) which addresses some of the issues. Here are a couple of extracts:
"So long as this social environment or context consists of mutually manifest
assumptions relevance theory is capable, in principle, of providing an
account of such socially motivated uses of language (see for example
Escandell-Vidal 1996; Jary 1998a; Terkourafi 1999). Begging, advising and
permitting can be dealt with along similar lines. I will argue that not only
begging, requesting, advising and permitting, but all such 'socially
relevant' speech acts (that is, acts which both depend on and affect the
social environment of the interlocutors) are communicated acts. "
Since the interpretation of Hanno's (1) in contexts (a) and (b) depends on
the social environment of the interlocutors, RT should be able to account
for the different ways in which the hearer would interpret (1) in the two
contexts. One claim from my paper which relates directly to Hanno's question
is the following:
"In the case of new information conveyed by an utterance, its strength will
be a function of the strength of the speaker's commitment to the proposition
expressed by her utterance together with the hearer's assessment of the
speaker's credibility."
These considerations have an impact on the way an utterance of (1) would be
interpreted in contexts (b) and (c). This is not an 'add-on' to RT, but I
believe is intrinsic to the theory if we take a broad view of the human
cognitive system:
"Jary (1998b: 165) [...] suggests that information about an individual's
social environment is easy to process, since the human cognitive system is
designed to be able "to form and maintain alliances, to keep track of one's
relative status and that of others, to calculate the likely effect of one's
actions on the way others think of you and their likely responses to your
actions." Since we live in complex social groupings, such information
typically yields adequate contextual effects. Information that is both easy
to process and likely to yield adequate contextual effects is, in relevance
theory, relevant information."
I will be happy to send an electronic copy of my paper to anyone who
requests it.
Steve
References
Escandell-Vidal, V. (1996) Towards a cognitive approach to politeness. In K.
Jaszczolt and K. Turner (eds.), Contrastive semantics and pragmatics.
Oxford: Pergamon Press, 629-650.
Jary, M. (1998a) Relevance theory and the communication of politeness.
Journal of Pragmatics 30: 1-19.
Jary, M. (1998b) Is relevance theory asocial? Revista Alicantina de Estudios
Ingleses 11: 157-169.
Terkourafi, M. (1999) Frames for politeness: A case study. Pragmatics 9:
97-117.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Hanno T. Beck" <banneker@progress.org>
To: "'Relevance List'" <relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk>
Sent: Sunday, October 03, 2004 8:58 PM
Subject: RT list: A newcomer's inquiry
>
> I am new to this list. I have read Sperber and Wilson (1986) once only.
>
> I have a concern and would like to know your opinions on whether relevance
> theory might bear on it, or whether it would be a matter for some other
area
> of linguistics.
>
> Suppose sentence (1) is uttered by a person looking right at me, in a room
> with only the two of us:
>
> (1) The Melvin Hall dormitory is on fire.
>
> Now the total interpretation that I draw from that utterance will be
> influenced by many things. Three of those things are:
>
> (a) suppose the utterer is my boss; or
>
> (b) suppose the utterer spoke (1) very loudly and quickly, while waving
his
> arms, and that this manner of speaking is not typical of the utterer; or
>
> (c) suppose the utterer is known to be inconsistent, often untruthful, and
> generally unreliable.
>
> It seems to me that in cases (a) and (b) I am going to be willing to
invest
> more cognitive processing effort, and in case (c) less effort, than in a
> neutral situation.
>
> Does relevance theory have something to say about how and when we take
> things such as (a), (b) and (c) into account? Are there articles that
> someone could recommend, that might touch on considerations such as these?
>
> Thanks in advance for your advice,
>
> Hanno Beck
> banneker@progress.org
>
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