Dear Anabella,
about relevance theory and longer pieces of discourse, I have written a
PhD thesis on this: "On the cognitive role of genre: a
relevance-theoretic perspective" (University of London PhD thesis,
2001). A revised version of this will soon be published as a book. The
heart of the matter is to see how the addressee's expectations of
relevance are fine-tuned in processing complex ostensive stimuli.
Looking into these matters, it becomes clear, I think, that a 'more
linguistic' approach is illusory, since ostensive stimuli do no more
than provide evidence of the communicator's intentions, so it is the
thoughts that are invoked by the stimulus that need to be studied, and
the linguistic form contributes only a small part of that.
Best,
Christoph
-----------------------------------
Dr. Christoph Unger
SIL International
Alleestr. 7
67308 Albisheim
Germany
-----Original Message-----
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 23:32:31 +0200
Subject: RT list: Questions
From: "Anabella Niculescu" <anabellaniculescu@hotmail.com>
To: <relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk>
Dear All,
I would like to ask a few questions: any feedback is welcome and really
appreciated. Thank you in advance.
First of all, I would like to know how longer pieces of discourse, such
as a whole speech or a series of speeches can be analysed from an RT
perspective. It is true that one can take into consideration the main
principles put forth by RT and try to apply them, but I am more
interested in a more linguistic analysis. Does anybody know of the
existence of any articles on this subject?
Then, it is well established that processing effort and positive
cognitive effects are key-concepts in RT. Are there any articles on this
subject? (I am not talking about Dan Sperber's et. al articles about
testing the cognitive Principle of Relevance).
My question related to this topic is:
How can one test these two aspects from a linguistic perspective, when
it comes to speeches, or longer conversations?
One can easily create a hypothesis about what happens in an example such
as the following: one is running for her bus in the morning, with the
following thoughts, i. e the context (example quoted here from Lecture 3
of Pragmatics Online course 2003-2004; D. Wilson)
Context:
4a. I'll (probably) catch the bus.
4b. If I catch the bus, I'll get to the lecture in time.
4c. If I don't catch the bus, I won't get to the lecture in time.
As you arrive at the bus stop, you see the bus come round the corner
towards you, and conclude:
Input to cognitive processes
5 I WILL catch the bus.
The input in (5), when processed in the (artificial) context in (4a-c),
has two positive cognitive effects. It strengthens the contextual
assumption in (4a); and it combines with the assumption in (4b) to yield
the contextual implication in (6)."
So in this situation things are somewhat easier to analyse. What can one
say when trying to analyse a speech? Since the researcher cannot (due to
reasons beyond his control) analyse the H's direct response and
thoughts, what linguistic elements can be used to asses Relevance. Of
course, the final analysis should take into account more than the
linguistic aspects of the analysed speech; it should combine it with
background knowledge, assumptions, beliefs, and so on.
Thirdly, it is established that there are some factors that can
influence Relevance, length of utterance, frequency of a particular
element to name just a few. Could anyone suggest me some references
related to this subject?
Fourthly, I would like to know about any references in which one links
RT with Rhetorics (I am not talking about RT approach to irony and so
on, but Rhetorics and Argumentation, for example)
Thanks for your attention.
Many, many thanks
Anabella-Gloria Niculescu-Gorpin
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