Produktdetaljer
[...] this volume is a very interesting collection of papers which show the extent to which RT has developed and matured in the last few years. The papers shed light on the role inference plays in comprehension, and contribute significantly to a better understanding of how language is processed.
- Francisco Yus, University of Alicante, Spain, in Journal of Pragmatics 32, 2000,
[...] this book is a valuable presentation of current trends in relevance theory. It enables us to see that relevance theory can describe aspects that other approaches can not explain adequately. Moreover, the application has been extended to the analysis of linguistic phenomena in languages other than English, like Japanese, Spanish and Norwegian. This book should be useful both to experienced researchers in relevance theory, and to those who are interested in a cognitive approach to verbal communication.
- Xinzhang Yang, Xiamen University, China,
Several papers investigate the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning in order to account for the semantics of discourse connectives, for the role of intonation in utterance interpretation, and for focus phenomena. Other papers explore the role of the relevance theoretic notion of metarepresentation in utterance interpretation and prove its usefulness in the study of both linguistic topics such as epistemic modality and conditional clauses, and in the reanalysis of literary issues such as verbal humour.
Some of the central pragmatic issues dealt with are the interpretation of semantically underdetermined linguistic forms, the role and nature of pragmatic inference, the distinction between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning and the separation between explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning. The theory’s application to sociolinguistic topics is assessed and developed in an inspired account of phatic communication; and the theory’s usefulness in accounting for certain types of “grammatical” constraints is explored in relation to certain restrictions in the interpretation of indefinite descriptions.