Chapter 3 expands on the relevance-theoretic view of irony as echoic use, in which a speaker presents a proposition and communicates an attitude of dissociation towards that proposition. This attitude might vary, for example, bitterly mocking or gently teasing the person or kind of person who might express or believe in such a proposition. The chapter outlines the benefits of this view over traditional and Gricean approaches, using several examples of conversational irony. It then moves to a discussion of the extended eighteenth-century satire A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, first indicating features of the text which begin to reveal its irony, and then explaining the echoic structure of this irony in its use of a voice which is distinct from the author’s. The analysis identifies examples of interpretive embedding, in which alternative views are expressed, including views which may be attributed to Swift. It also considers how the degree of prior knowledge of Ireland’s history will affect the construction of context in individual readings. Reasons for using irony are discussed in terms of the cost–benefit model in relevance theory, in which there is an expectation (though not a guarantee) that interpretive effort should be matched with rewards.

Chapter 5 shows that the theories discussed in Chapter 4 explain how fictional narratives work as metarepresentations expressed via interpretive use. Authors metarepresent narrative voices, including narrators and characters, and communicate attitudes towards them. Considering narratives in this way breaks down some of the categories in traditional and stylistic approaches, such as the distinction between reliable and unreliable narrators. In addition metarepresentation allows for multiple embeddings and attitudes. These claims are illustrated with readings of extracts from two first-person narratives – Room by Emma Donoghue and The Tenant of Wildfell Hallby Anne Brontë – and two third-person narratives – ‘Edward and Pia’ by Donald Barthelme and The God of Small Thingsby Arundhati Roy. The chapter attends to the detail of narratorial alignment with a character, free indirect style and the representation of mind style. These examples show the complexities of metarepresentational layering which is possible in fiction, as well as the shifting of narratorial attitudes. A reader negotiates these features in interpreting the narratives, and in this way reading fiction can be seen as exercising the capacity to understand other minds. The concepts of metarepresentation and interpretive use relate fiction to other communicative uses of language.

This volume of chapters on topics in relevance theory has been assembled in honour of Deirdre Wilson, with all its chapters written by former students and/or colleagues of hers. My aim is to describe the impact of Deirdre’s presence on the linguistics scene in London and the significance of her work in establishing the new sub-discipline of pragmatics. This work shaped the development of our thinking (hence our research and teaching) on a range of linguistic issues, especially in the realm of meaning.

The editors of the volume asked me to provide a broad overview of the beginnings of relevance theory back in the 1970s, how it has developed over the decades and where I see it moving in the future, reflecting in the process on the collective work that Deirdre Wilson and I initiated and that has been joined and considerably enriched by many others. Here are some personal notes to help address these questions.