Christoph Unger

• PhD
• Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at Bielefeld University

It has long been recognised that at least some linguistic expressions —such as the connectives but in English and mais in French, and the particles doch in German and jo in Norwegian— function to affect the audience’s inference or reasoning processes rather than, or in addition to, provide conceptual content. There is a debate, however, whether the...

In classic rhetoric allegory is defined as a trope, a figure of thought where the communicator says something other than what she means, and examples include short sayings such as To scuttle the ship on which he himself is sailing (Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory 8.6.47). However, literary theorists studying allegory point out that allegories can...

Vortrag

Beamer presentation accompagnying the paper with the same name

How hearers arrive at intended meaning, which elements encode processing instructions in certain languages, how procedural meaning and prosody interact, how diverse types of utterances are interpreted, how epistemic vigilance mechanisms work, which linguistic elements assist those mechanisms, how a critical attitude to information and informers dev...

Presentation slides for the paper

Presentation slides to the paper

In this paper I argue that a unitary account of the modal and non-modal uses of the German particles ja and doch can be provided by appealing to essentially non-representational properties of the theory of procedural meaning in Relevance Theory (RT). According to Wilson (2011), procedural indicators such as ja and doch function by raising the activ...

In this paper I argue that a unitary account of the modal and non-modal uses of the German particles ja and doch can be provided by appealing to essentially non-representational properties of the theory of procedural meaning in Relevance Theory (RT). According to Wilson (2011), procedural indicators such as ja and doch function by raising the activ...

In this paper I argue that a unitary account of the modal and non-modal uses of the German particles ja and doch can be provided by appealing to essentially non-representational properties of the theory of procedural meaning in Relevance Theory (RT). According to Wilson (2011), procedural indicators such as ja and doch function by raising the activ...

In this paper I review a semantic analysis of the Badini Kurdish modal particles dê and da (Unger, 2012). This analysis claims that the modal particles are procedural indicators in the sense of Blakemore (2002) triggering cognitive inferential procedures relating to assessing the speaker's commitment to the veracity of the communicated content and...

Contemporary studies in the linguistic semantics of particles have been greatly influenced by two ideas: that these items trigger pragmatic processing procedures rather than provide purely conceptual content, and that the procedures that some of them trigger relate to the recovery of metarepresentations. Recent developments in the theory of procedu...

The insight that verbal communication involves a coding process that feeds into inferential ones naturally led to the conclusion that natural languages may encode not only conceptual content but also instructions for the inferential processing of conceptual content (Blakemore, 1987, 2002). But the inferential nature of verbal communication also sug...

"Genre, Relevance and Global Coherence" seeks to explain how discourse types or genre may influence the addressee's inferential processes in identifying the communicator's intention. There are two main areas where such an influence is often felt: the interpretation of tense and aspect markers is often said to differ in various text types, and the c...

The previous chapters of this book were designed to assess the nature and implications of existing approaches to genre based on the theory of global coherence. I want now to present an alternative, relevance-based account by developing some of the ideas sketched in previous chapters. In Chapter 2, I examined the view that a notion of global coheren...

In this paper I want to argue that adequate explanations for socio-pragmatic phenomena need to be based on comprehension models involving a cognitive concept of relevance (as in Sperber & Wilson's 1995 relevance theory), as opposed to socially- or rationality-based maxims (as in Kitis 1999; Holdcroft 1979 in the former, and Grice 1989 and Green 199...

This paper discusses a variety of translation problems which are often attributed to genre effects. These effects are analyzed and shown to reveal that genre is a diverse notion which can function in various ways in comprehension processes. To explain these, an account of genre based on relevance theory is proposed. The central claim of this accoun...

The main aim of this paper is to discuss the claim that discourse connectives are best treated as indicators of coherence relations between hierarchically organized discourse units. It will be argued that coherence relations cannot be seen as cognitively real entities. Furthermore, there is no evidence for hierarchical organization in discourse. Th...

The following introduction to relevance theory is taken from chapter 1, section 4 of: Unger, C. 2001: ÔOn the cognitive role of genre: a relevance-theoretic perspective.Õ University of London PhD thesis, pp. 19-29. I have extracted the relevant bibliographic references and added one cross-referenced example from another chapter of the thesis in an...

A topic for both literary studies and discourse analysis is the global structure of texts. Studies of global text structure have largely been focused on narrative structure, where a major strand of research has been devoted to the role which grounding (sometimes called information staging or foreground-background articulation) has for discourse str...

This paper looks at three sets of data, two from Behdini-Kurdish and one from Estonian, where a metarepresentational use analysis enhances the linguistic analysis of certain linguistic forms. The aspective marker da in Behdini is used in two ways, as a near counterfactual past and a distant habitual past: (1) ew da genim-ê çîn-in They IM wheat-OBL....

Lexical pragmatics starts from the assumption that the meaning communicated by a word is underdetermined by its semantics, and lexical pragmatists usually study the processes involved in bridging the gap between the encoded and the communicated meaning of words. This paper studies a different but related question: wether different types of linguist...