Re: RT list: relevance theory and discourse?

Dear all,

Relevance and discourse meaning were indeed widely discussed in the late
1980s and early 1990s when the idea of 'constructing the context' as
presented in RT was new and controversial. I agree with Louis that what has
to be remembered is that the recovery of the speaker's intentions does not
necessarily equal the recovery of the speaker's assumptions: there are
open-ended texts and discourses where the addressee is free/encouraged to
go beyond the recovery of intentions. I wrote a paper on this a long time
ago, 'Relevance and Infinity: Implications for discourse interpretation'
(Journal of Pragmatics 25, 1996), comparing the ideas of RT and Levinas's
Totality and Infinity in order to answer the questions posed in S&W
1986/96: (i) how assumption schemas are worked out and (ii) what determines
the orer of accessibility of hypotheses. I suggested a doubly-dynamic
process of context construction, where assumptions are not only recovered
through intention recognition but also created (or, on an analogous
construal, recovered but are of the form of instructions to the addressee
to decide what the meaning should be). How to represent this meaning in a
contextualist framework (truth-conditional pragmatics, intrusionist
semantics, and so forth), and even what meaning to represent, are still
open and widely discussed questions in the semantics/pragmatics debates,
especially as regards its possible formalization.

With best wishes to all,
Kasia

-- Dr K.M. Jaszczolt, Reader in Linguistics and Philosophy of Language,
Department of Linguistics, MML, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue,
Cambridge CB3 9DA, and Newnham College, Cambridge CB3 9DA, United Kingdom
tel. +44 1223 335744; fax +44 1223 335053;
http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/~kmj21

Forthcoming in February 2009 from Oxford University Press: Representing
Time: An Essay on Temporality as Modality.
http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199214440&view=00&promo=webling08&salepage=%2Fsale%2Fwebling08%2F
Received on Wed Jan 28 09:25:51 2009