This paper considers the pragmatic contribution of hashtags on the social networking site Twitter. Taking a relevance-theoretic perspective, I argue that hashtags contribute to relevance by adding a layer of activation to certain contextual assumptions and thus guiding the reader's inferential processes. The information contained in a hashtag may guide the hearer in the derivation of both explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning, and may also have stylistic consequences. Twitter facilities one-to-many, asynchronous communication, and so tweeters are unlikely to be able to assume that they share contextual assumptions with all or any of their audience. By allowing tweeters to make their intended contextual assumptions accessible to a wide range of readers, hashtags facilitate the use of an informal, casual style, even in the unpredictable and largely anonymous discourse context of Twitter.

Hashtags online perform a range of linguistic (Zappavigna, 2015) and pragmatic (Scott, 2015) functions alongside their categorising and searching functionalities. In Scott (2015), I argued that these different functions are, at least partly, driven by the properties associated with mediated discourse. However, hashtags are also sometimes produced in spoken discourse, where the interlocutors share a physical context and are likely to have access to a range of contextual assumptions and nonverbal cues that are unavailable online. In face-to-face communication the audience is less likely to be "imagined" in the sense of boyd (2010) and the speaker is less likely to have to negotiate "context collapse", as identified by Marwick and boyd (2011). Drawing on principles from the relevance-theoretic pragmatic framework (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/95), I argue that in such an enriched context, the range of pragmatic functions of hashtags is likely to be reduced, and will be motivated by factors other than an impoverished discourse context. I draw on data from attested spoken examples and show that spoken hashtags seem to be largely restricted to their interpersonal "metacomment" (Zappavigna, 2015, p. 6) function, and that they are most commonly used to provide evaluative judgements on the rest of the utterance and to guide inferences concerning the speaker's attitudinal stance.

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In this paper I present a reanalysis of the English demonstrative determiners this and that. I assume a relevance-theoretic (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95) approach to utterance interpretation in general and to reference resolution in particular, and argue that demonstratives encode procedural rather than conceptual meaning. In some cases this procedural meaning contributes to reference resolution directly and so affects the propositional content of an utterance. In other cases, however, the procedural information encoded by the determiner contributes to what is implicitly communicated by an utterance. This aspect of their use and interpretation has been largely overlooked by previous analyses, and taking it into consideration allows us to develop a unified account of the various and disparate roles they play.