Robyn Carston

Thoughts and Utterances is the first sustained investigation of two distinctions which are fundamental to all theories of utterance understanding: the semantics/pragmatics distinction and the distinction between what is explicitly communicated and what is implicitly communicated. Features the first sustained investigation of both the semantics/pragmatics distinction and the distinction between what is explicitly and implicitly communicated in speech.

The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication

Thoughts and Utterances

Seiji Uchida

This collection of papers arises from a meeting of relevance theorists held in Osaka, May 29-30, 1993. It presents the full breadth of relevance theory, both in its applications to problems of utterance interpretation, that fall within the domain of pragmatics, and its implications for linguistic semantics. Several papers investigate and assess the theory's account of figurative uses of language, such as irony, metaphor and metonymy. Other central pragmatic issues include a relevance-driven account of generalized implicature, the role of bridging implicatures in reference assignment, the way in which different intonation patterns contribute to the relevance of an utterance, and the application of the theory to literary texts. The recently developed semantic distinction between conceptually and procedurally encoded meaning, motivated by relevance-theoretic considerations, is employed in new accounts of several Japanese particles and in a fresh perspective on the phenomenon of metalinguistic negation.

Applications and Implications

Relevance Theory

Kate Scott

Billy Clark

Showcases recent research by leading scholars working within the relevance-theoretic pragmatics framework.

Robyn Carston

Books

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