Meaning and Relevance

When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is a process of inference guided by precise expectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics...

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When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is a process of inference guided by precise expectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics and the thoughts that humans are capable of entertaining and conveying? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations, metaphors and ironies? Is the ability to understand speakers' meanings rooted in a more general human ability to understand other minds? How do these abilities interact in evolution and in cognitive development? Meaning and Relevance sets out to answer these and other questions, enriching and updating relevance theory and exploring its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies.

Deirdre Wilson is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at University College London and Research Professor at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo.

Dan Sperber is Emeritus Directeur de Recherche at the Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, Paris and part-time university professor in the departments of philosophy and cognitive science at the Central European Un...

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Deirdre Wilson is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at University College London and Research Professor at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo.

Dan Sperber is Emeritus Directeur de Recherche at the Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, Paris and part-time university professor in the departments of philosophy and cognitive science at the Central European University, Budapest.

List of figures page vii
List of tables viii
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xiii
1 Introduction: pragmatics 1
dan sperber and deirdre wilson
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List of figures page vii
List of tables viii
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xiii
1 Introduction: pragmatics 1
dan sperber and deirdre wilson
Part I Relevance and Meaning 29
2 The mapping between the mental and the public lexicon 31
dan sperber and deirdre wilson
3 Truthfulness and relevance 47
deirdre wilson and dan sperber
4 Rhetoric and relevance 84
dan sperber and deirdre wilson
5 A deflationary account of metaphors 97
dan sperber and deirdre wilson
6 Explaining irony 123
deirdre wilson and dan sperber
Part II Explicit and Implicit Communication 147
7 Linguistic form and relevance 149
deirdre wilson and dan sperber
8 Pragmatics and time 169
deirdre wilson and dan sperber
9 Recent approaches to bridging: truth, coherence, relevance 187
deirdre wilson and tomoko matsui
10 Mood and the analysis of non-declarative sentences 210
deirdre wilson and dan sperber
11 Metarepresentation in linguistic communication 230
deirdre wilson
Part III Cross-Disciplinary Themes 259
12 Pragmatics, modularity and mindreading 261
dan sperber and deirdre wilson
13 Testing the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance 279
jean-baptiste van der henst and dan sperber
14 The why and how of experimental pragmatics: the case of
‘scalar inferences’ 307
ira noveck and dan sperber
15 A pragmatic perspective on the evolution of language 331
dan sperber and gloria origgi
Notes 339
References 350
Index 373
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