Relevance Theory—New Directions and Developments

Carston, Robyn; Powell, George

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199552238.003.0016

Cited by 14 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Roberts, 1993:20). A similar view is maintained in RT (Powell, 2001b): a definite description ''the F'' linguistically constrains (rather than determines) its interpretation to an individual concept of F in a salient context (Carston and Powell, 2006;Powell, 2001a). However, what is the salient context that gets exploited in the interpretation of nominators?…”

Section: Foundational Issues: Pointing Experiments and The Set-up Of mentioning

confidence: 88%

Pointing and reference reconsidered

Lücking

Pfeiffer

Rieser

2015

Journal of Pragmatics

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Current semantic theory on indexical expressions claims that demonstratively used indexicals such as this lack a referent-determining meaning but instead rely on an accompanying demonstration act like a pointing gesture. While this view allows to set up a sound logic of demonstratives, the direct-referential role assigned to pointing gestures has never been scrutinized thoroughly in semantics or pragmatics. We investigate the semantics and pragmatics of co-verbal pointing from a foundational perspective combining experiments, statistical investigation, computer simulation and theoretical modeling techniques in a novel manner. We evaluate various referential hypotheses with a corpus of object identification games set up in experiments in which body movement tracking techniques have been extensively used to generate precise pointing measurements. Statistical investigation and computer simulations show that especially distal areas in the pointing domain falsify the semantic direct-referential hypotheses concerning pointing gestures. As an alternative, we propose that reference involving pointing rests on a default inference which we specify using the empirical data. These results raise numerous problems for classical semantics--pragmatics interfaces: we argue for pre-semantic pragmatics in order to account for inferential reference in addition to classical post-semantic Gricean pragmatics.

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Section: Foundational Issues: Pointing Experiments and The Set-up Of mentioning

confidence: 88%

Pointing and reference reconsidered

Lücking

Pfeiffer

Rieser

2015

Journal of Pragmatics

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“…The account of utterance interpretation provided by relevance theory is grounded in "a general claim about cognitive design, the claim that human cognition is geared towards the maximisation of relevance" (Carston/Powell 2006). Relevance itself is seen as a potential property of input to inferential processing.…”

Section: Theoretical Coordinatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…What all this means is that the process of interpretation, far from being a haphazard, hit-or-miss kind of activity, is in fact highly principled. It proceeds thus (Carston/Powell 2006):…”

Section: Theoretical Coordinatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The English Possessive Marker in a Framework of Relevance

Aitken¹

2017

HJLCB

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English nominals constructed with the morpheme {-s} as a so-called possessive marker may be assigned an indefi nitely large number of interpretations depending on the context of utterance. This raises interesting questions concerning the interface between semantics and pragmatics, most obviously concerning the more specifi c nature of the contextually invariable encoded content of the morpheme as well as the contribution made by that content to the process of comprehension. This article aims briefl y to suggest one solution to these problems by proposing an underdetermined procedural semantics feeding into a principled cognitive process of inference as proposed within the framework of relevance theory.

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“…Carston, Levinson, Chierchia and Sperber and Wilson are among those who consider that their accounts should enjoy psycholinguistic as well as linguistic validity, and that their predictions about the availability and generation of SIs should be empirically (dis)confirmable (cf. Levinson 2000:5, 81, 162ff, 370; Chierchia 2004:51, 68, 93; Carston and Powell 2006 for the relevance theory perspective). Relevance theory and Levinson’s account are actually motivated by cognitive considerations (principles arising from cognitive evolution and the psychology of sentence processing, respectively).…”

Section: Experimental Investigationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pragmatics: From Theory to Experiment and Back Again

Katsos

Cummins

2010

Language and Linguist. Compass

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This paper reviews some cases in which the collaboration of theoretical pragmaticians and psychologists of language has been most fruitful for all parties. Linguists have benefited from experimental data confirming the psychological validity of their observations and providing theorycritical evidence in cases beyond the reach of reflective intuition, while psychologists have benefited from having a wealth of linguistic phenomena to study as well as multiple theories furnished by semantics and pragmatics. Focusing on the much-discussed question of whether scalar implicature is a default inference, we aim to showcase the benefits of the experimental approach to pragmatics.

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Relevance Theory—New Directions and Developments

Cited by 14 publications

References 38 publications

Pointing and reference reconsidered

Pointing and reference reconsidered

The English Possessive Marker in a Framework of Relevance

Pragmatics: From Theory to Experiment and Back Again

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