Hi all,
My name is Miri Hussein. I am a PhD student at Newcastle University. I
will be working on “discourse connectives” in both English and my native
language Syrian Arabic. RT will be of paramount importance to my study
since I am seeking a relevance-theoretic approach to the investigation of
discourse connectives in Syrian Arabic. I will follow Blakemore’s (1987)
proposal of "procedural meanings" in which she argues that certain
linguistic expressions, such as ‘so’, ‘therefore’, ‘but’, etc. do not
affect the truth conditions of utterances in which they occur, but
constrain the inferential phase of the utterance interpretation. Such
connectives, as Blakemore points out, work as procedures that guide the
hearer/reader in his/her search for the interpretation which is consistent
with the principle of relevance; the interpretation that carries the great
contextual effects with the minimum processing effort. I will try to see
how that would work with the similar linguistic expressions in Syrian
Arabic and discuss whether RT and Blakemore’s proposal are tenable in
Syrian Arabic.
Best Wishes,
Miri
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 29 2005 - 10:28:30 GMT