Re: RT list: relevance theory and discourse?

From: Louis de Saussure <louis.desaussure@lettres.unige.ch>
Date: Thu Jan 29 2009 - 08:20:13 GMT

This is, I think, of great interest, and those further inferences - which I call 'free conjectures', and which resemble, but to some extent only, weak implicatures - , are, I suppose, also the possible grounds for the formation of a new informative intention, hence the possibility to RT to extend its explanative scope at least to some aspects of conversation. Unfortunately I think I published something about that only in French (Revue de sémantique et pragmatique 2005).

All best,

Louis

ernst-august_gutt@sil.org wrote:

Dear all,

It seems to me that the notion of indeterminacy due to weak communication
takes care of most of these concerns about the open-endedness of intended
interpretations. Beyond the matter of intended interpretation there is then,
of course, the matter of further possible inferences triggered by the
cognitive principle of relevance. (In fact, the cognitive principle of
relevance sometimes seems to interfere with the recovery of the
communicator's intended interpretation: the addressee may go off on a
tangent following a track of inferences that appear to him/her of higher
relevance than the information offered by the communicator.)

Best wishes,
Ernst-August Gutt

  

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk 
[mailto:owner-relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk] On Behalf Of 
Dr K.M. Jaszczolt
Sent: 28 January 2009 09:26
To: Louis de Saussure
Cc: Christoph Unger; Mai Zaki; relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk
Subject: 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&prom
o=webling08&salepage=%2Fsale%2Fwebling08%2F











    

Received on Thu Jan 29 08:20:52 2009