Relevance: Communication & Cognition
... While a long tradition has tied this uniqueness to language compositional structure stressing code-like features (e.g., Berwick and Chomsky, 2016), the pragmatic turn has emphasized the underdetermined nature of communicative acts along with the cognitive processes required to interpret them (e.g., Scott-Phillips, 2015a, 2015b. The most influential pragmatic model of human communication is the ostensive-inferential account proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986) with Relevance Theory (RT). RT is based on the idea that communication involves the expression and recognition of intentions, two intertwined abilities enabled by the cognitive capacity of entertaining representations about others' mental states. ...
... While the first clause -informative intention -can describe even noncommunicative acts, the second and third clauses -communicative intention -apply to actions performed with the intent to be communicative and which are meaningful exactly in light of this overtness. The capacity to express and recognize intentions has been clarified in its cognitively form by RT (Sperber and Wilson, 1986). Since the intentions conveyed are not inflexibly mapped onto pre-established meanings, RT highlighted that inferential and mentalizing capacities aimed at reading others' mental states are required to perform full-blown communicative acts. ...
... Within RT, gaze alternation illustrates the basic structure of ostensive interaction: a communicator engages in eye-contact to draw the addressee's attention to something that is relevant to her and conversely the addressee will be willing to consider that "something" as relevant because of the ostensive nature of the interaction (Sperber and Wilson, 1986). In this perspective, eye-contact is viewed as a basic marker of ostensive communication (Moore, 2016). ...
This chapter is set against the background of one of the most important pragmatic models of language: the ostensive-inferential model advanced by Sperber and Wilson (1995) with Relevance Theory (RT). According to RT, the speaker provides just evidence (e.g., an utterance) of his intention to convey a certain meaning and the listener comprehends speaker’s meaning by producing a series of inferences that are governed by that evidence. From this view, communication involves the expression and recognition of intentions, which are largely based on cognitive systems relating to the functioning of the so-called “social brain”. Discussing some empirical results from cognitive ethology, comparative psychology and neuroscience, this contribution brings evidence in favor of the idea that some cognitive systems underlying the communicative use of language are also present in non-human animals. This analysis contributes to consider the study of social cognition in non-human animals as crucial for the construction of pragmatic models of human language largely inspired by the theory of evolution.
... This article proposes a method for analyzing visual metaphor from the perspective of the relevancetheoretic approach, utilizing categories such as ad hoc concepts, emergent properties, and metarepresentations. The problem of metaphor analysis remains one of the most debated within Relevance Theory (hereafter referred to as RT), whose founders interpret metaphor similar to other loose uses (Sperber & Wilson, 1986;1995, p. 233-237), which are not metaphorical. ...
... When constructing an ad hoc concept, the listener/viewer/reader selects from the encyclopedic entry of the source concept a core or non-core property that can be metaphorically adapted to the target (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995Rubio-Fernández, 2008, p. 381-382). In this process, the scope of the verbally or visually encoded concept is either expanded or narrowed. ...
... When constructing an ad hoc concept, the listener/viewer/reader selects from the encyclopedic entry of the source concept a core or non-core property that can be metaphorically adapted to the target (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995Rubio-Fernández, 2008, p. 381-382). In this process, the scope of the verbally or visually encoded concept is either expanded or narrowed. ...
The article proposes a method for analyzing visual metaphors using Relevance Theory tools, including ad hoc concepts, emergent properties, and meta-representations. It identifies the specific features of visual metaphor meaning inference as a multi-component structure based on the interplay of explicature, contextual assumptions, and implicatures from ad hoc properties of visually encoded source and target concepts. The study demonstrates that implicatures from the source domain concept's ad hoc properties, adapted to the target, form primary and secondary mappings between domains, checked for relevance against contextual constraints and meta-representations. A hypothesis is proposed and tested regarding the influence of domain visualization methods and processing focus on cognitive effort and achieving an optimal balance between effort and cognitive effects.
... As metaphors are pragmatic element by nature, one theory which has provided some new perspective for their interpretation is Relevance Theory. Provided by Wilson and Sperber (1995), the main problem addressed by Relevance Theory in particular is how metaphors are understood and how an audience fills the gap between the linguistic code of an utterance and the speaker's intended meaning. ...
... However, a basic question is that why should audience go through a process of first flouting a maxim and then adopting a new interpretation of a combination of words in a metaphoric expression, since such a process may take more time and also is not economical in language use. Wilson and Sperber's (1995) Relevance Theory provides an alternative explanation for the way language is comprehended by language users. According to them, relevance comes from the formation of cognitive effects as a result of the processing of the input available to cognition. ...
... According to them, relevance comes from the formation of cognitive effects as a result of the processing of the input available to cognition. Wilson and Sperber (1995) reiterate that any cogent pragmatic theory should provide an account of how the audience of a message interprets speech or any other form of linguistic input. Relevance Theory tries to explain how we use cognitive resources when we recognize that someone has openly produced an act of intentional communication. ...
In second language acquisition, EFL learners need to develop both linguistic and conceptual proficiency to grasp metaphoric expressions. Understanding metaphors in second language acquisition is complex and influenced by various factors. According to Relevance Theory, comprehension involves the search for the most relevant interpretation of an utterance by means of a mechanism known as processing effort. Metaphors are seen as a way to create cognitive effect by mapping concepts from one domain (source domain) onto another (target domain). This study followed a mixed, cross-sectional design (qualitative-quantitative analysis). The present study aimed at identifying what role context plays in EFL learners' understanding of metaphors and took eight sessions to complete. To this end, in each session, 10 metaphors were given to 30 Upper-intermediate EFL learners who were selected based on convenience sampling. The EFL learners were required to guess the meaning of the metaphors after reading a text from Mark Twine's short stories. Then, the learners were provided with contexts including the same metaphors in the first phase. The results of the t-test indicated a significant difference between understanding of contextualized and decontextualized metaphors (p value = 0.000; P <0.05). In facing with novel metaphors, EFL learners tend to resort to context as they had no access to any other sources. The findings of the study imply that context is a key element to provide cognitive effect for the interpretation of metaphors since contextual clues satisfy expectation of relevance.
... Human social reasoning and pragmatic prediction with ToM are integral to high-level cognitive processes (Sperber and Wilson, 1986;Bara, 2011). Inspired by this fact, we explore how the depth 7 of trainable network layers in a Transformer-based LLM (Vaswani et al., 2017) Setup. ...
... Machine Pragmatics. Rooted in linguistic theory (Grice, 1975;Austin, 1962;Searle, 1975;Sperber and Wilson, 1986), the study of pragmatics within machine learning has recently been explored in terms of how LLMs perform in scenarios involving various pragmatic phenomena Lipkin et al., 2023;Ruis et al., 2023;Qi et al., 2023;Sravanthi et al., 2024) or subtle social norms Shapira et al., 2023). Theory of mind (ToM) (Premack and Woodruff, 1978) has been tested in tasks such as false-belief reasoning (Kosinski, 2023;Ullman, 2023), story comprehension (Jones et al., 2023), and multi-turn interactive contexts (Kim et al., 2023 few-shot prompting with chain-of-thought (Wei et al., 2022) and step-by-step reasoning (Kojima et al., 2022), while proposed a graph module for tracking each character's mental state. ...
... The literature indicates that they form feature-based representations [4,9,15,16,30,31], but leaves open whether these representations involve other components such as labels themselves, or non-linguistic category markers, or symbols that act as category placeholders. In adults, category representations include labels that people spontaneously access even when passively viewing images of objects [19,32,33], and non-linguistic indexes [34] that become activated by category-diagnostic content, provide access to the long-term semantic knowledge, and can be thought of as non-linguistic symbols evidenced to support higher-order compositional thinking outside of natural language [35]. An evolutionary precursor of such representational structure may be present in non-human primates, as indicated by strong categorical responses unaffected by featural differences between individual category tokens observed in the prefrontal cortex of rhesus monkeys [36,37]. ...
... External symbols are provided through natural language, in the form of words, or via other symbolic systems such as mathematical notation. Internal symbols are believed to be provided via non-linguistic symbolic systems, also known as Languages of Thought [34,60,61], whose psychological reality has recently been experimentally corroborated (for a review see [35]). The current results suggest that by the end of the first year of life, infants may be including symbolic components in their category representations but leave open two further questions: whether these symbols are linguistic or not, and what is the mechanism through which they give rise to the category-oddball effect. ...
Humans categorize objects not only based on perceptual features (e.g. red, rounded), but also function (e.g. used to transport people). Category membership can be communicated via labelling (e.g. ‘apple’, ‘vehicle’). While it is well established that even preverbal infants rely on labels to learn categories, it remains unclear what is the nature of those categories: whether they simply contain sets of visual features diagnostic of category membership, or whether they additionally contain abstract category markers or symbols (e.g. linguistic in the form of category labels or non-linguistic). To address this question, we first used labelling to teach two novel object categories, each composed of unfamiliar visually unrelated objects, to adults and nine-month-olds. Then, we assessed categorization in an electroencephalography category-oddball task. Both adults and infants displayed stronger neural responses to the infrequent category, which, in the absence of visual features shared by all category members, indicates that the categories they set up contained feature-independent category markers. Well before language production starts, labels help infants to discover categories without relying on perceptual similarities across objects and build category representations with summary elements that may be critical for the development of abstract thought.
... According to the early proponents of the theory, such difficulties accompany autistic individuals throughout development. The ToM account predicts difficulties in pragmatics under the assumption that pragmatics involves the mind-reading abilities that Grice (1975Grice ( , 1989 and followers (e.g., Sperber andWilson [1986] 1995) postulated. This was precisely Baron-Cohen's (1988) and Baron-Cohen et al. 's (1985, 1986 approach to the "pragmatic deficits" observed in autistic children: pragmatic deficits are the results of an "impaired theory of mind. ...
... According to the early proponents of the theory, such difficulties accompany autistic individuals throughout development. The ToM account predicts difficulties in pragmatics under the assumption that pragmatics involves the mind-reading abilities that Grice (1975Grice ( , 1989 and followers (e.g., Sperber andWilson [1986] 1995) postulated. This was precisely Baron-Cohen's (1988) and Baron-Cohen et al. 's (1985, 1986 approach to the "pragmatic deficits" observed in autistic children: pragmatic deficits are the results of an "impaired theory of mind. ...
This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the different topics, traditions and methods which together make up the field of pragmatics, broadly conceived as the cognitive, social and cultural study of language and communication, i.e. the science of language use.
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... receiver, but aims to produce a change in the receiver's representation of the world, and that this change then has a spillover effect on the interlocutor's actions (e.g., Fraser, 1983;Origgi and Sperber, 2000;Sperber and Wilson, 1986). Grice (1957), one of the fathers of philosophical pragmatics (see Adornetti and Ferretti, this volume), asserts in the seminal article entitled "Meaning" that for speaker A to produce utterance x is functional to elicit a response in the interlocutor (usually the formation of a belief or the production of an action): "'A meant NN 1 something by x' is (roughly) equivalent to 'A intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience'" (Grice, 1957: 385). ...
... If the encoding and decoding mechanisms are well matched, what is encoded at the beginning of the process is identical to what is decoded at the end: information is perfectly transferred from the sender to the receiver. This way of thinking about communication is traditionally called the "code model" (Sperber and Wilson, 1986). Such a model combines two ideas: the conduit metaphor (Reddy, 1979), i.e., the idea that signals are messages that are "packed," sent to the receiver through a transmission channel, and eventually "unpacked" by the receiver in order to understand the message; and the mathematical theory of communication (Shannon, 1948;Shannon and Weaver, 1949), according to which signals are strings of information transmitted through a channel along which interference may occur. ...
One of the most heated debates in animal communication studies over the past fifty years can be summarized in terms of the opposition between two approaches: the informational model and the manipulative (or even influence) model. According to proponents of the former model, communication is a process involving the transfer of information from a sender to a receiver. Proponents of the manipulative model, on the other hand, argue that communication can be defined not in terms of information, but in terms of the influence that signals produced by the sender have on the receiver: from this point of view, animal signals are functional in that they influence receivers to act in a certain way. This chapter reconstructs some of the major stages of this debate and argues in favour of the communication-as-influence model. It is argued that such an approach is consistent with the basic assumptions of some pragmatic models of human communication, according to which the production of utterances aims to bring about a change in the recipient's representation of the world, and that this change then has a cascading effect on his or her actions.
... Another view that considers imprecision to involve a pragmatic adjustment is that of Relevance Theory (RT; Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995. In RT, imprecision is seen as a variety of lexical broadening, the outcome of a mechanism of ad hoc concept construction. ...
... Another view that considers imprecision to involve a pragmatic adjustment is that of Relevance Theory (RT; Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995. In RT, imprecision is seen as a variety of lexical broadening, the outcome of a mechanism of ad hoc concept construction. ...
While maximum standard absolute adjectives (such as straight) typically have a precise meaning (e.g., ‘perfectly straight’), they are also regularly used imprecisely (e.g., to mean ‘straight enough’). The current study investigates how contextual expectations of precision and a visual referent’s conceptual distance from an ideal maximum standard influence the processing effort of precise and imprecise interpretations of these adjectives. In three experiments, we showed native speakers of English images depicting objects that could be referred to precisely or imprecisely via an absolute adjective and asked them to select the image that best matched the written sentence (Experiments 1 and 2) or to read sentences containing maximum standard absolute adjectives (Experiment 3). Experiment 1 presented no discourse context, and participants accepted, on average, only a small degree of imprecision; and when they did, they took longer, relative to cases in which the same adjectives were used precisely, which is in line with existing empirical findings. Experiment 2 contrasted two kinds of discourse contexts (raising high or low expectations of precision) before the presentation of the test sentences. When expectations of precision were high, participants tolerated only a small degree of imprecision, and when they did, it came at a cost, as in Experiment 1. When expectations of precision were low, much larger degrees of imprecision were tolerated but, critically, participants were still, overall, faster to reach precise, relative to imprecise, interpretations in supporting contexts, suggesting that accessing the precise meaning is less effortful. Experiment 3 supported these findings by showing how the cost of understanding imprecision is also present in a self-paced reading task. Our results lend support to the view that maximum standards are part of the encoded meaning of these adjectives.
... Analisis pragmatis membantu penerjemah untuk menangkap makna implisit dan nuansa yang mungkin tidak dapat disampaikan melalui terjemahan harfiah (Gutt, 2000). Selain itu, nada dan gaya bahasa juga harus diperhatikan agar terjemahan dapat mencerminkan suasana dan karakteristik dialog dalam teks asli (Sperber & Wilson, 1995). Dengan demikian, penerjemah harus memiliki pemahaman yang mendalam tentang struktur informasi dalam bahasa sumber dan target, serta kemampuan ATHLA : Journal of Arabic Teaching, Linguistic And Literature, 5, (1), 2024 ...
... Studi oleh Venuti (Venuti, 2017) (Gutt, 2000). Penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa analisis pragmatis dapat membantu penerjemah untuk menyesuaikan terjemahan sesuai dengan konteks dan tujuan komunikasi, memastikan bahwa pesan asli dapat disampaikan dengan cara yang paling efektif dan dapat dipahami oleh penonton target (Reiss & Vermeer, 1984;Sperber & Wilson, 1995). ...
Translation in the context of film media is often influenced by the ideologies of the translators and production companies. This influence can significantly shape how meaning is conveyed to audiences from different cultural backgrounds. This study aims to analyze the translation techniques used in the subtitles of the film "Theeb" through a pragmatic approach to understand how translators handle the intentions behind the film's dialogue. A descriptive qualitative research method is employed to analyze the conversation transcripts from the film. Speech act theory is applied to explore how various translation techniques are used to convey the original intentions of the dialogue accurately. The findings reveal that seven out of the eighteen translation techniques proposed by Albir and Molina are utilized in the film: literal translation, modulation, idiomatic, established equivalent, compensation, and adaptation. This research provides insights into the application of speech act theory in film subtitle translation and identifies effective techniques for accurately conveying speech intentions in different cultural and linguistic contexts. The study underscores the necessity for translators to consider cultural context and ideologies in translation to ensure that the subtitles are both accurate and culturally sensitive. Further research should explore translation techniques in films from diverse cultural backgrounds and examine the impact of translators' cultural backgrounds on their translation choices.
... As suggested by Sperber and Wilson lingua pragmatics is the main connection between the linguistic signals and pragmatic knowledge [19]. The expressions analyzed under lingua pragmatics have its unique worth in being utilized as they are in social interaction. ...
Every language is unique and one word or sign may mean differently each of them. So, this article is devoted to the research of one branch of linguistics – about phraseological units with somatic elements from the point of lingua-pragmatic aspect in both English and Uzbek languages. The purpose of article is to describe the way of phraseological units, indicating human’s interpretation and understanding of the world through the names of human body parts too. The choice of somatic phraseological units for research is explained not only by their wide range use in common life, but also by the fact that they are expressive, figurative, clearly reflect the peculiarities of the spiritual and material life of the person. Moreover, the background analysis of somatic phraseological units and lingua pragmatics are illustrated as well as meaning of the phraseological units with the component of somatisms are analyzed on a pragmatic basis. According to previous researches, most parts of the body and their nominations have several connotative symbolic meanings, arising from the basic meaning of the “human’s body part” based on the metonymic transference are studied. In order to explore some examples of somatic phraseological units, some methods are used such as illustration, observation and comparison. Many differences and similarities are revealed relying on lingua-pragmatic features in both languages because they differ from geneological and morphological perspectives. All examples of somatic phraseological units like idioms, proverbs and others given in the article are taken from paremiological and phraseological dictionaries as well as prominent novels in Uzbek and English.
... Previous research has explored various aspects of social interaction and communication, revealing significant insights into politeness and face-work (Brown & Levinson, 1987;Goffman, 1955), as well as the dynamics of learning in social contexts (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Searle (1969) contributed to understanding speech acts, while Sperber and Wilson (1986) examined the role of relevance in communication, highlighting cognitive processes involved in interactions. Additionally, Tajfel and Turner (1986) introduced social identity theory, focusing on intergroup behavior. ...
This research aims to analyze impoliteness strategies found in the Instagram comments of Jennie, a famous celebrity. The study employs a discourse analysis approach to identify and categorize various impoliteness strategies that may appear in these comments. Research data were collected from comments posted on Jennie's Instagram posts within a specific time frame. The results of the study reveal several impoliteness strategies commonly found in these comments, such as insults, mockery, and the use of offensive language. Additionally, the research identifies the contexts or situations that may trigger the use of these impoliteness strategies. Data analysis is conducted qualitatively, citing examples of comments that illustrate each impoliteness strategy. The findings of this research can provide insights into how celebrities like Jennie can become targets of impoliteness on social media and may assist in the development of strategies for handling and managing impolite comments on social media platforms. The study also offers a deeper understanding of social media users' behavior when interacting with public figures and the cultural and social implications of impoliteness strategies in online communication.
... In communicative situations therefore, the participants are engaged in effective transmission and interpretation of the social relevance or topic relevance of utterances. See Sperber and Wilson (1986) for tips on the concept, "topic relevance". Elite Olshtain and Marianne Celce-Murcia, cited in Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi E. Hamilton (2001, p. 716) posit that "when using language for communication, we are faced with two major types of processes: transmitting our ideas and intentions to an addressee or interpreting and understanding the text or message produced by an interlocutor. ...
Discursively, this paper examines critical perspectives on “discourse”, which is the focus of “discourse analysis”.
Discourse reveals the communicative potentials of human language across domains. A conventional instrument of
communication, language is not exhaustive in its communicative potential. The literature of discourse analysis is
replete with front-burner postulations on the nature of language, discourse, human communication, social
structures and value systems. A study of such postulations is worthy of scholarly attention as it can explain their
implications, relevance and functionality when language is used either for cohesive or divisive roles in society.
Language anchors the relationship between humans and socially realistic phenomena. In this regard, discourse is
a framework for elucidating the bottom-line issues of “language in use” in the real world of humans: the universe
of discourse. Hinging on Critical Linguistics, this study concludes that across texts and genres, discourse is:
construction of knowledge, social phenomenon, sense and reference, ideology, linguistic convention, action,
context of speech and context of situation.
... There are specific strategies as discussed by Jubair (2023, p. 13) that lead to the process of having any utterance pragmatized. Cognitively speaking, Sperber and Wilson (1986) argue that utterances are pragmatized through socio-cognitive and cultural mechanisms that build relevance among utterances and their communicative contexts. ...
This study deals with having the pragmatic force of a given expression be lost under certain processes of de-contextualization, conventionalization and abstraction. This phenomenon is introduced under the term ‘de- pragmatization’. It is addressed as a broad strategy that enriches language with new contexts of use for expressions that already exist in different contexts. The phenomenon in question is tested via selected expressions from Iraqi Arabic, as an objective to explore the strategies of de-pragmatization to borrow new contexts through certain strategies such as semantic erosion, formalization, institutionalization, disambiguation, simplification, elimination of the cultural aspects, loss of context, literalization, avoiding pragmatic markers, and abstractions. The de-pragmatized expressions can be identified with such features as recontextualization, minimizing illocutionary load, conventional meaning, frequent use, and used by people of influence. This process plays a key role in shaping language and future communication modes as it can be viewed as a significant indicator of a language’s adaptability and responsiveness to societal paradigm shifts.
... As explained by Sperber and Wilson (1995), the process of inferential comprehension is non-demonstrative, but even under the best circumstances, communication may also fail. The recipient can neither decode nor deduce the intention of the communicator. ...
Reading comprehension is an essential skill in learning a foreign language, and it is one of the most important means for language learners to acquire information. The ability to comprehend any reading text requires interpreting it by making accurate connections between the linguistic representations or literal meaning of words and sentences and their pragmatic outcomes, which enable learners to infer the intended meaning of the text. The present study takes Relevance Theory as the theoretical basis and examines the implementation of pragmatic inference in teaching reading comprehension to EFL university students. This study seeks to explore a) whether the pragmatic inference approach to teaching reading is more effective than the conventional one; b) whether teaching pragmatic inference improves students’ reading proficiency. The study employs a quantitative quasi-experimental design in which a pre-test, post-test, and reading proficiency test were used for the purpose of data collection. The samples were (56) Kurdish EFL second stage students majoring in English at the University of Sulaymaniyah. The students were from two classes: the experimental class and the control class. The two classes were taught using different reading teaching methods within six weeks of experimental teaching. The key findings of the study revealed that there are significant differences between the two groups of the study; the experimental group outperformed those in the control group quite significantly and with tangible improvement in their reading proficiency. The study can be of great significance for teachers and curriculum designers since it draws their attention to this ignored area of study.
... Por supuesto, no podemos olvidar que las metáforas visuales se enmarcan en el pensamiento figurativo descrito por Lakoff y Johnson en la Teoría de la metáfora conceptual (1980), lo que significa que la interpretación de las viñetas políticas tiene un componente subjetivo añadido y depende directamente del lector (Agüero Guerra, 2013, p. 9). Durante la decodificación del mensaje, el sujeto debe asumir en primer lugar la relevancia del objeto, descartando el ruido que acompaña al mensaje, basado principalmente en «recursos gráficos, verbales, tipográficos y pictóricos» (Rodríguez & Velásquez, 2010, p. 41), para centrarse en la caricatura política (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). ...
Este artículo utiliza la metodología del análisis del discurso multimodal, aplicada a una muestra de 277 caricaturas políticas de todo el mundo, categorizando los recursos más utilizados en la construcción del mensaje occidental en la invasión rusa de Ucrania. Para ello, se han establecido 33 marcos cognitivos, detectados por medio de la teoría del encuadre (framing theory), que abarcan un período que se extiende más allá del primer año del conflicto, desde los días anteriores a la invasión hasta el asesinato de Yevgueni Prigozhin, líder del Grupo Wagner.
... Contrary to the coherence school's view, relevance theorists believe that the connectivity of discourse connectives should not be confined to the connection of different discourse utterances/segments, but should be extended to a kind of inferential connection. Their theoretical basis is Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). Relevance Theory posits that one party in communication will express the maximum amount of discourse information to allow the other party to understand at the least cost, thereby achieving the greatest contextual effect and optimal relevance in communication. ...
Connectivity is widely regarded as one of the most crucial attributes of discourse markers. Nevertheless, as of now, two ostensibly disparate concepts prevail with regard to the connectivity of discourse markers. One is exemplified by Schiffrin's assertion that the connectivity of discourse markers manifests the connection between different discourse utterances (segments). In contrast, the other is represented by Blakemore's view that the connectivity of discourse markers should not be confined to the connectivity of different discourse utterances but rather extend to inferential connectivity. Building upon these two ideas, this paper undertakes a further exploration of the connectivity of discourse markers from a perspective of a broader sense of context, thereby enabling a more comprehensive study of the connectivity of discourse markers and a more complete exploration of their functions.
... t. People see that it offers a ray of hope. By donating the organs, in some way the person they loved lives on."In 1986, the French linguist Sperber and the British linguist Wilson jointly published their pragmatics book Relevance: Communication and Cognition, in which they proposed the relevance theory, an important theory of cognitive pragmatics.(Sperber & Wilson, 1995) The core of this theory is the ostensive-inferential communication model. Relevance theory has a positive impact on pragmatics, linguistics, literature, psychology, philosophy and other fields, such as translation studies. Ernst August Gutt, who is Sperber and Wilson's student, studied the theory of translation from a cognitive perspect ...
With rapid globalization, people need to read news reports every day to keep pace with the changing world. News, especially English news, has become one of the most effective and fastest means to disseminate information in different languages and cultural backgrounds. The metaphor, as an essential rhetorical method, is always used in news English. The correct understanding of metaphors in the news plays a crucial role in obtaining news information accurately. Therefore, it is necessary to achieve the optimal metaphor translation in news English, so as to promote communication and mutual understanding between different cultures. This paper adopts the relevance translation theory as the theoretical basis. Firstly, the research on the translation of metaphor and news English is reviewed. Secondly, the overview and applicability of the relevance translation theory are elaborated. Finally, under the guidance of this theory, this paper analyzes the three translation methods adopted by translators in translating metaphors, based on the specific examples of news English.
... Punning is trouble for contextualist accounts of metaphor (Sperber & Wilson, 1986, 2008Recanati, 1995Recanati, , 2002Recanati, , 2010Bezuidenhout, 2001;Wearing, 2006;Carston, 2010Carston, , 2012. Contextualism views metaphor as an instance of loose use, and maintains that it is explicable in the same way as other types of loose use. ...
What is the status of metaphorical meaning? Is it an input to semantic composition or is it derived post-semantically? This question has divided theorists for decades. Griceans argue that metaphorical meaning/content is a kind of implicature that is generated through post-semantic processing. Others, such as the contextualists, argue that metaphorical meaning is an input to semantic composition and thus part of “what is said” by an utterance. I think both sides are right: metaphorical meaning is an input to semantic composition and it is also derived post-semantically. I explain how this is possible by positing that successful metaphor involves coining a new word on the spot; this new metaphorical word is ambiguous with its literal counterpart. I show that an ambiguity theory of metaphor, far from being the obvious non-starter that it has long been treated as, actually offers elegant predictions of a whole suite of otherwise recalcitrant linguistic data.
... In addition to these foundational theories, more recent pragmatic approaches have explored the dynamic and context-dependent nature of interrogative acts. For instance, Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) emphasises the role of cognitive processes in communication, arguing that questions are designed to maximise relevance by guiding the interlocutor towards providing the most contextually appropriate information. According to this theory, the interpretation of questions depends on the interplay between the speaker's intention and the hearer's inference-making capabilities. ...
... A framework for comprehending the roles of PMs is provided by the concept of politeness by Brown and Levinson (1987) and the Functional Systemic Linguistics (FSL) notion by Halliday and Matthiessen (2013). Perceivable relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986) categorizes PMs as textual and interpersonal categories, which forms the basis for studying PMs. According to relevance theory, PMs help the listener better grasp the speaker's intended meaning by guiding their explanation of a statement. ...
This study explored pragmatic markers (PMs) used by college students in casual interactions. Understanding the prevalence, range, frequency, diversity, social context and functions of PMs, were the goals of the study. A qualitative descriptive method was used to examine nine student discussions. Participants were chosen at random from the Faculty of Education, Zuwila, Sebha University, Libya. Conversations in casual environments, such as residences and cafeterias, were discreetly recorded. PMs were found and grouped according to their function and social environment using thematic analysis. The results of the investigation showed that PMs were highly prevalent in all areas, including social interactions, agreement, and admiration. Pupils used a wide spectrum of PMs; the social milieu affected the frequency and variety of use. A greater variety of PMs were utilized in informal contexts for relationship development, emotional expression, and social navigation. The study's overall findings emphasize how important PMs are to student communication. These indicators are more than just filler words; they are vital resources that help students interact with others, communicate clearly, and form relationships. This study adds to a more comprehensive understanding of PM usage in regular student conversations.
... Over the past fifty years, in pragmatics it has become customary to conceive of communication as a matter of degree. There is a continuum of communicated contents ranging from explicit meaning to explicatures (Sperber & Wilson, 1995), implicitures (Bach, 1994, strong and weak implicatures (Wilson & Sperber, 2004). This affects also the so-called 'explicit' or 'literal' meaning: the idea that it is possible to neatly distinguish between the content literally expressed by a sentence ('what is said') and the implicit content of the sentence ('what is implicated' by a speaker uttering the sentence) has been widely criticised. ...
In this paper I characterize an unexplored category of what I call unfinished speech acts (USA), intentionally designed by the speaker as incomplete, and intended to be finalised by the hearer. The speaker relies on the hearer’s contribution because she is willing to minimize conversational risk regarding a certain implicit content or a certain indirect speech act. I focus on three paradigm cases: insinuations, polite novel (as opposed to conventionalized) indirect speech acts, and flirting. I sketch a general characterization of USAs, and underline several important dissimilarities between USAs and standard implicatures and conventionalized indirect speech acts. In closing, I gesture at ways the notion of USA could clarify recent philosophical debates, from both a theoretical and a socially engaged point of view: my proposal elucidates how explicit and implicit contents manage to enter the conversational context and, more generally, how speech acts are successfully performed – with an obvious impact on how we conceptualize both the speaker’s and the audience’s conversational responsibility.
... Popular theories include the hypothesis of executive dysfunction, used especially to explain pragmatic disorders in neurological and neurodegenerative conditions [41,42], the weak central coherence hypothesis [43], used especially in the case of autism [44], and the social dysfunction hypothesis, which found application to the case of autism as well as right-hemisphere damage [45,46], traumatic brain injury [47,48] and schizophrenia [49][50][51]. In the last view, pragmatic difficulties are linked to a decline in ToM skills [52], i.e., the ability to infer other people's emotional and cognitive mental states and to plan behavioral responses appropriate to others' expectations [53], referring also to the theoretical view, elaborated within post-Gricean pragmatics [54,55], that pragmatics is a matter of inferring speaker's intentions and can thus be described as a subcomponent of ToM [55,56]. ...
Pragmatic impairments are largely documented, yet rarely considered in clinical practice, also due to a poor characterization of pragmatic profiles across conditions, as well as some overlap with theory of mind (ToM) in the conceptualization of pragmatics. Here we present the outcome of a 10-year program that started with creating a novel test, the Assessment of Pragmatic Abilities and Cognitive substrates (APACS), and evolved in using it – along with ToM assessment – in seven clinical groups (i.e., amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, multiple sclerosis, right-hemisphere stroke, Parkinson’s disease, traumatic brain injury, schizophrenia, and dyslexia). The multistudy cross-diagnostic analysis of 454 participants revealed that receptive pragmatic skills were impaired in all clinical groups compared to controls, with schizophrenia showing the most severely impaired profile, whereas expressive pragmatic skills were impaired in four neurological conditions (i.e., Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, right-hemisphere stroke, and traumatic brain injury). The association with ToM was limited to receptive pragmatics and moderate in the whole sample. Overall, pragmatic impairment emerged as a diffuse feature of neurological and psychiatric illnesses, which contributes to defining complex socio-communicative phenotypes but cannot be equated to a social cognition deficit and should hence be the target of specific assessment and intervention.
... A cognitive-interactive perspective on the origin of grammar by representing reality in such different ways? According to Sperber and Wilson (1986), it is useful to refer to the notion of "mutual manifestness" in order to answer this question. In their view, notions such as "mutual knowledge" and "mutual assumptions" are not only conceptually vague and empirically inadequate but also feed an untenable model of communication, the code model (Shannon and Weaver, 1949). ...
... Part I also includes Chapter 3 by Chiera, entitled "The Cognitive Foundations of Ostensive-Inferential Communication: Insights from the Study of Non-Human Primates' Communication". This chapter is situated within the neo-Gricean perspectives of pragmatics and, more specifically, within the cognitive approaches to ostensive-inferential communication that take Sperber and Wilson's (1986) RT as their point of reference. The appeal to the ostensive-inferential model of communication is an appeal to a perspective in which the meaning of an utterance is determined by the speaker's intentions (see previous section). ...
This chapter analyses the path from philosophical pragmatics to evolutionary pragmatics. Specifically, the first part of the essay shows how pragmatics emerges in the context of ordinary language philosophy with reference to the idea of meaning as use. The second part examines the definitions of pragmatics offered by the two main schools of thought on the subject that have developed over time: the Anglo-American tradition and the continental European tradition. The last part of the essay outlines the contours of a new line of research in the field of language origins studies: evolutionary pragmatics. The chapter proposes that considering pragmatics as the basis for the origin of human communication (and, secondarily, language) means taking into account the specific contribution of three fundamental factors: 1) selective pressures driving the evolution of communication; 2) structural preconditions (i.e. brain and cognitive structures underlying the use of language); 3) material conditions of expression (i.e. the evolution of the channel used in communicative exchange).
... Conversely, pragmatic theory has, at least partly, extended its scope. In particular, relevance theory as proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1995) does not only offer a theory of "non-literal" meaning but rather proposes an alternative way of thinking about communication (Scott-Phillips, 2015). Instead of the classic "code model", according to which communicators encode their intended meaning in messages that are then decoded by recipients, it sees all communication as ostensive-inferential, i.e. a communicator signals that they want to convey a certain meaning, and the meaning is inferred by the audience on the basis of the available evidence (Wilson and Sperber 2006: 607; see Adornetti and Ferretti, this volume; Chiera, this volume). ...
... The Relevance Theory -also referred to as the Principle of Relevance -is a discursive theory developed by Sperber and Wilson. A first version appeared in 1986, and has since then been subjected to different updates (see, for example, Sperber and Wilson 1995and Wilson and Sperber 2002a. Albeit they developed this principle from the maxim of relation of Grice's Cooperative Principle [1] , their proposal should not be understood as an extension of Grice's work, but rather as a theory on its own and as a different way of explaining how we communicate linguistically (Reyes 1996: 53). ...
Keywords English: This article aims to illustrate how a pragmatic analysis based on the Relevance Theory can be applied to the study of humour in audio described products. More particularly, its main purpose is to show the results of a discursive analysis of both the original version and the audio described version of the comedy film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. First the theoretical framework used is outlined, and then some examples are included to illustrate the way those different theoretical concepts can be applied empirically. Such an application provides a discursive and descriptive account of how humour travels in audio description. It also evidences the role that describers can perform as providers of the new information that is needed for the process of inference to be completed successfully. The Relevance Theory The Theory The Relevance Theory-also referred to as the Principle of Relevance-is a discursive theory developed by Sperber and Wilson. A first version appeared in 1986, and has since then been subjected to different updates (see, for example, Sperber and Wilson 1995, 1998 and 2002 and Wilson and Sperber 2002a and 2004). Albeit they developed this principle from the maxim of relation of Grice's Cooperative Principle [1] , their proposal should not be understood as an extension of Grice's work, but rather as a theory on its own and as a different way of explaining how we communicate linguistically (Reyes 1996: 53). Briefly put, when a sender makes clear his or her intention to communicate (ostensive communication), it creates a presumption of adequate effect for the minimum necessary processing effort (or, at least, with no unjustifiable processing effort), if optimal relevance is sought. The receiver has to discriminate between what the speaker's words mean (sentence meaning) and what the speaker actually means (utterance meaning), and he or she does so by means of inference-that is, the process by which an assumption is given validity from the validity of another assumption (Escandell 1996: 111). When communication is to take place, the receiver uses additional-new-knowledge (contextual assumptions), which he or she combines with existing-previous-knowledge (existing assumptions) to interpret what is not explicit and derive cognitive effects. The receiver, then, brings together the linguistic meaning of the sentence and the background knowledge he or she shares with the sender to interpret the sender's communicative intention. This process is time and effort consuming but, if the item of information is relevant, it has a reward, which consists of an improvement or satisfying modification of our representation of the world [2]. Cognitive Effects
According to a dialectical approach to argumentation, a single argument can be seen as a dialogical "Why? Because!" sequence. Does this also apply to multimodal arguments? This paper focuses on multimodal arguments with a predominantly visual character and shows that dialogues are helpful for identifying and reconstructing arguments in multimodal communication. To include nonverbal arguments in dialectical argumentation theory, it is proposed to regard dialogue as mode-fluid. The account of multimodal argument as dialogue will be compared with Champagne and Pietarinen’s account of visual argument as movement.
Abstrak Pembelajaran peribahasa dengan penerapan kaedah menghafal maksud kamus sahaja tidak akan dapat merangsang kemahiran berfikir aras tinggi pelajar. Guru perlu mengenal pasti pendekatan yang bersifat menyeluruh. Pendekatan yang dimaksudkan perlulah berupaya membantu pelajar untuk memahami maksud, menghubungkaitkan penggunaan peribahasa dan makna dalam konteks ujaran sebenar, serta menghayati dan menghargai estetika peribahasa Melayu. Sehubungan dengan itu, pengkaji meneliti pengaplikasian pendekatan semantik inkuisitif dalam analisis makna peribahasa yang terkandung dalam sukatan pelajaran Bahasa Melayu sekolah menengah berpandukan Kurikulum Standard Sekolah Menengah (KSSM) Bahasa Melayu
This paper explores the role of irony as a powerful mechanism for critiquing key pragmatic theories, including Austin’s Speech Act Theory, Grice’s Cooperative Principle, Leech’s Politeness Principle, and Wilson and Sperber’s Relevance Theory. While these theories provide robust frameworks for understanding the dynamics of language use, they often assume a level of straightforwardness and sincerity in communication that irony subverts. Through an analysis of literary quotations, this study demonstrates how irony disrupts the expected norms of speech acts, cooperative communication, politeness, and relevance, revealing the limitations and oversights inherent in these pragmatic models.
TSAKURE Wannan takarda, nazari ne ta fuskar ilimin ma'ana a muhallin magana a Hausa. Daga cikin abubuwan da wannan takarda ta yi bayani, sun haɗa da irin sassauyawar ma'ana da ake samu daga jimloli da suke ɗauke da kalmar hannu a dalilin muhallin maganar da aka faɗe su. Irin waɗannan jimloli yawancinsu kan kasance adon magana amma ma'anarsu kan sauya duba da irin muhallin da aka yi amfani da su. Hanyoyin da aka bi wajen tattaro bayanai dangane da wannan takarda kuwa, sun haɗa da ganawa da masana da suke da alaƙa da ɓangaren ilimin kimiyyar harsuna. An kuma karanta ayyukan da masana suka wallafa dangane da waɗannan ɓangarori na ilimin kimiyyar harsuna, musamman waɗanda suka shafi ilimin ma'ana. An kuma yi amfani da hanyar hira da haifaffun masu magana da harshen Hausa don jin irin ma'anonin da suke ba wa kalmomin. Don ganin an sami madogara dangane da bayanan da aka yi cikin wannan takarda, an ɗora wannan bincike ne a kan ra'in Speber da Wilson, 1995, waɗanda suka samar da ra'in dangane da muhallin magana a bigeren alaƙa. Binciken ya gano cewa muhallin magana na taka rawa sosai wajen fayyace ma'anar irin waɗannan jimloli da adon magana. Har wa yau, binciken ya gano cewa Kalmar hannu ba lallai ma'anarta ta kasance hannu a matsayinsa na sashen jiki ba, sai dai ko a sami alaƙa tsakanin sabuwar ma'anar da hannu ta fuskar adon magana.
This study investigates the interpretation of indirect speech in the Quran, where meanings often extend beyond what is explicitly stated. Misinterpretations can arise when the listener’s understanding differs from the speaker’s intended meaning, a challenge particularly evident in the Quran due to its complex rhetorical nature. Using Thomas’s (1995) Speaker’s Meaning Framework, the research conducts a document analysis from a pragmatic perspective, focusing on the oral discourse between Prophets and their people. The findings, supported by insights from reputable Quranic scholars, highlight that the speaker’s meaning in indirect speech is best understood by considering both context (including physical, environmental, social, cultural, and linguistic factors) and the speaker’s intention. The study concludes that interpretation methods can be divided into those based on context and intention, and those based solely on intention. These insights are significant for guiding readers of the Quran in accurately interpreting indirect speech.
In this article, we summarise and critically evaluate Ryan Nefdt’s The Philosophy of Theoretical Linguistics: A Contemporary Outlook (2024). In this book, Nefdt brings the tools of philosophy to bear on contemporary linguistics, targeting perennial debates in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonology, and the evolution of language. In so doing, Nefdt sketches several tantalising paths for progress on these topics. Although some of Nefdt’s arguments are underdeveloped, this book serves as a worthwhile introduction to the philosophy of linguistics.
The word “relevance” did not exist in Shakespeare’s time even though its synonyms and precursors abound in his work. Then as now, the plays needed to make a connection with the audience, to demonstrate some bearing upon their life experience, even as the robust apparatus of Elizabethan and Jacobean censorship precluded making obtrusively topical political references. This introduction asks whether and how Shakespeare is relevant in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, the COVID pandemic, the #MeToo movement, and the climate crisis produced by the human devastation of our environment. However, we also ask whether relevance is something that, in certain contexts, should not, perhaps, be embraced so eagerly but rather resisted in favor of a more profound understanding of historical determinants. Shakespeare’s cultural value, after all, does not consist only in his relevance understood in such narrow terms that the plays and poems are reduced to being a list of correspondences with or mere allegories for our times. While it is crucial to ask if Shakespeare is relevant, it is equally important to inquire, especially in relation to marginal and global communities, “Relevant to whom?” Further, while issues of politics and social and environmental justice can be readily understood under the rubric of relevance, Shakespeare’s poetics is less obviously amenable to it. However, the “poetics,” the creative framework, the specifically literary features of the plays that cannot be reduced to any paraphrasable content, are precisely the features that facilitate and enable the “relevance” of Shakespeare’s works even across the chasm of the centuries since Shakespeare composed them.
Az alábbiakban először bemutatom a pragmatika főbb iróniaértelmezéseit a jelen terjedelmi keretekhez igazodva. Ezt követően összefoglalom, hogy 100 egyetemi hallgató válaszai alapján milyen következtetéseket vonhatunk le az irónia hétköznapi fogalmáról és feltételezett funkcióiról. A tanulságok fényében tisztázom saját álláspontomat, kitérve az irónia és az ugratás, valamint az irónia és a szarkazmus viszonyára. Végül magyarázatot keresek arra, miért társul az irónia zavartalanul más trópusokkal, gondolatalakzatokkal, és miért érezzük olyan gyakran humorosnak. A nyelvi példaanyag részint zenei anekdotákból, részint a hivatkozott szakirodalomban sűrűn idézett ironikus (vagy legalábbis annak mondott) megnyilatkozásokból tevődik össze.
This chapter analyzes some basic aspects of language used by individuals with schizophrenia and shows that the various impairments that become apparent can be summarized and interpreted by the terms perspective and frame. In order to highlight the ways in which disorders of thinking and language manifest themselves in schizophrenia, three areas where linguistics overlap with neuroscience and cognitive science in general were analyzed: metaphor, irony, and the coherence of conversations.
This paper investigates the developmental trajectory of the debate concerning the nature of religious language, particularly the contrast between its literal and metaphorical dimensions, situating it within the broader context of linguistic, philosophical, and theological scholarship. Drawing on contemporary research, it offers a critical evaluation of three major approaches, with a detailed analysis of one in particular. The first two approaches, literalism and metaphoricism, are critiqued for their reductionist frameworks, which fundamentally erode the multifaceted nature of this discourse. The third approach, while avoiding these reductionist pitfalls, still calls for further clarification of the mechanisms underlying the interplay between these elements. Through conceptual analysis and grammatical examination, it demonstrates that this proposal, which posits a dynamic interaction—where neither dimension is subordinate to the other, but rather, they paradoxically coexist—yields a more accurate account. The findings suggest that this dialectical approach surpasses the conventional treatment of the literal–metaphorical nexus, proposing that religious language is not only communicative and comprehensible but also an evolving process in which grammatical perplexity fosters semantic depth and intellectual insight.
Family Guy is an American animated sitcom that tells us about the daily life of the Griffin family. This show displays a type of humor that, at some points, does seem to go beyond accepted limits or standards of behavior, while satirizing American culture. In this article, attention is paid to the use of a pedophile disorder-incarnated in the character of John Herbert-to generate humor. Our purpose is to provide an exploratory description of how a highly sensitive-even offensive-topic such as pedophilia is treated in this adult animation show and to reflect on how translation-English > European Spanish-might or might not affect the way that the said topic is presented in the two cultures involved. After considering the presence of pedophilia in the chapter "The Courtship of Stewie's Father," we cautiously conclude that no sign of (self)censorship is spotted and that both versions keep the same potential humor for an adult audience.
This study delves into the realm of humor found in memes that proliferated across various digital platforms in Saudi Arabia in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These memes emerged as instrumental means of communication, coping, and adaptation throughout the crisis. The research is driven by the objective of categorizing and comprehending the humor in these memes through a qualitative content analysis. The study adopts the incongruity-resolution (IR) framework to scrutinize 150 Saudi memes. The analysis is centered on incongruity-resolution strategies, the interaction between text and image, and contextual elements that contribute to comprehension. The results reveal that Saudi COVID-19 memes predominantly employ seven incongruity-resolution strategies, both with and without image integration. Notably, a substantial portion of the memes (30.5%) defies categorization within any specific IR class and is hence classified as ‘textless memes.’ These memes effectively convey compelling messages without any textual content, relying on shared experiences. The analysis has yielded valuable insights into the diverse methods employed in constructing humor, resolving incongruities, and the significance of contextual information in generating humorous effects. These findings carry implications for cross-cultural communication, digital media, public health communication, and the exploration of humor within crisis situations. Understanding the role of humor in navigating global crises and its evolutionary dynamics is pivotal for achieving effective communication and adaptation within the rapidly transforming digital landscape.
This article examines the lexical memory work performed by the British New Left as it differentiated itself from the organised labour movement post-1956. It argues that activists use memory to reframe the meaning of keywords in the ‘protest lexicon’, and that this is an important, though usually implicit, activist cultural practice. Based on previous work in conceptual history and cognitive science, it begins by situating lexical memory work as an activity on the border between narrative historical memory, semantic memory and implicit collective memory. It then discusses the resignification of the word solidarity during the long 1960s, when lexical work was a key feature of the New Left’s apostasy from traditional Marxism. Finally, it examines the case of the British heterodox Marxist journal, Solidarity, outlining how it intervened in the protest lexicon by wrenching free the keyword solidarity from previous meanings, changing its historical referent and, ultimately, resignifying it.
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