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11 - Relevance Theory and Context

from Part III - Pragmatic Approaches to Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 November 2023

By
Deirdre Wilson
Edited by
Jesús Romero-Trillo
Jesús Romero-Trillo
Affiliation:
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
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Summary

This chapter considers the treatment of context in relevance theory, a cognitively oriented pragmatic theory which sees human communication and cognition as governed by the search for relevance. Utterance interpretation crucially relies on context, and a central question for pragmatics is about how hearers find the right contextual information to use in interpreting an utterance, and thus succeed in identifying the speaker’s meaning. According to relevance theory, utterances raise precise and predictable expectations of relevance which guide the hearer in every aspect of utterance interpretation, from disambiguation and reference resolution to the choice of contextual information and the derivation of implicatures (i.e. intended implications). After outlining the main assumptions of Relevance Theory, the chapter illustrates with examples how these different aspects of interpretation fit together, and compares Relevance Theory’s treatment of context with some alternative treatments discussed in the pragmatic literature, including those based on a notion of “common ground.”

Keywords

Ostensive communicationspeaker’s meaningcommon groundexpectations of relevancecontextual implicationprocessing effort

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The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context , pp. 247 - 267
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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