The speaker’s derivational intention

Adopting the basic tenets of relevance theory, Powell (2010) introduces the concept of derivational intention as something separate from a speaker’s informative intention. The derivational intention of a speaker is an intention concerning the pragmatically inferred route that the hearer should take in order to recognize the speaker’s informative intention. This paper addresses what can happen when a speaker’s derivational intention is at odds with a particular piece of procedural information encoded by some linguistic expression, with the conceptual semantics of a lexical item, or with the procedural meaning of an intonation pattern employed by the speaker. The procedural meaning of one expression may override that of a co-occurring expression when there is a conflict between them.

• Affiliations: 1: Norwegian University of Science and Technology