Pragmatics - Volume 33, Issue 3, 2023

The idea that interpreting a lexeme typically involves a context-dependent process of meaning construction has in recent years become common ground in linguistic theory. This view is very explicit in relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995), which posits that speakers systematically infer ad hoc concepts (Carston 2002). Such an approach raises theoretical issues, though. First, it directly poses a challenge for the exact nature of (and difference between) concepts and ad hoc concepts (Carston 2002, 249). In addition, as Wilson (2011, 2016) and Carston (2013, 2016) point out, this view also uncovers the following paradox: if speakers are assumed to follow a path of least effort (relevance heuristics), why should they so systematically infer ad hoc concepts rather than test the encoded concept first? The aim of this paper is to reflect on this theoretical puzzle. It will first be argued that the hypotheses formulated both by Wilson and by Carston seem rather post hoc and fail to fully resolve the apparent paradox. Attention will then be given to the assumed nature of (ad hoc) concepts to show that the problem can be resolved when an alternative (non-atomic) view of concepts in terms of meaning potential is adopted.

Ad hoc concept construction is regarded as a case of free pragmatic enrichment, so it is presented as a non-linguistically mandated process that is automatically accomplished during mutual parallel adjustment. Recent research suggests that this lexical pragmatic process may be marked and steered by various linguistic elements. These include evaluative morphemes, lexical and phrasal items adjacent to content words, and stylistic resources like repetition or rewording. This paper argues that paralanguage may fulfil a similar enacting function and finetune the conceptual representations arising from content words on the grounds of idiosyncratic, context-dependent features or shades, as well as propositional and non-propositional information about the speaker’s psychological states. However, the paper restricts this function to expressive interjections, prosodic inputs like pitch, contrastive stress and pace or tempo, and gestural inputs such as language-like gestures, pantomimes and emblems. Conative interjections, intonation and proper gesticulation would be excluded from contributing to lexical pragmatic processes.

The paper focuses on non-literal uses of proper names in XYZ constructions, such as the use of the personal name Donald Trump in Boris Johnson is the Donald Trump of UK politics or ‘5G’ is the Donald Trump of telecom, and argues that such uses can be best accounted for by relevance theory. While in their primary use, proper names uniquely denote specific individuals and have no meaning on their own, in their secondary uses, they act as common nouns, capable of conveying non-literal meanings. In relevance theory, such non-literal uses can be explained in terms of lexical modulation or ad hoc concept formation. The analysis of selected examples shows that while some of the XYZ constructions can be seen as metaphors, others are better described as category extensions, and it substantiates the relevance-theoretic claim that there is no clear cut-off point between the two varieties of loose use.

Online communication has created new ways to express emotions, including emoji and reaction GIFs. Emoji are often discussed as signs for meaning-making, adding emotional tone to communication. Reaction GIFs express emotions and attitudes in a playful manner. This study shows that through the lens of cognitive pragmatics, these phenomena are not distinct. Both are cases of non-verbal communication pointing to the communicator’s emotional state. Drawing on relevance-theoretic notions of the showing-meaning continuum and perceptual resemblance, along with relevance-theoretic analyses of metaphor and irony, I argue that emoji and reaction GIFs provide clues to ostension and communicate emotions by virtue of perceptual resemblance between what they represent and the communicator’s emotional state. I will also argue that both emoji and GIFs can involve echoic use of language, enabling the communicator to convey their attitude.

This paper explores the nature of clickbaiting as a form of viral journalism from a relevance-theoretic perspective (Sperber and Wilson 1995; Wilson and Sperber 2012). The focus is on deceptive clickbaits, i.e., manipulative internet headlines whose interpretation, based on the way they are worded, leads to opening an information gap, thus luring the reader into clicking on the link provided with a view to increasing the website traffic. It is highlighted that such headlines exploit linguistic underdeterminacy, and unlike felicitous headlines, which provide an accurate representation of the article content and therefore play the role of relevance optimizers (Dor 2003), deceptive clickbaits induce recipients to generate interpretations which arouse their intense curiosity but are ultimately incompatible with the article’s content. The paper shows how relevance theory can explain the interpretation bias that the reader of deceptive clickbaits falls prey to and advances the idea that there is affinity in this respect between deceptive clickbaits and jokes.

Contrastive studies of languages usually focus on differences in lexical items, syntactic structures, semantic expressions, collocations, and so on. In the present paper we take a cognitive pragmatic approach, assuming that metarepresentation in the sense of Sperber (2000) and Wilson (2000) offers a crucial perspective in such studies. We discuss how the speech act component of higher-level explicatures is linguistically realized in Japanese and English, focusing on sentence adverbials, ‘because’ clauses, speech act particles, reported speech, private predicates, and desiderative predicates. We conclude that in the Japanese language, information concerning the speech act component tends to be linguistically realized, while such information is not necessarily realized in English. We suggest that this cognitive pragmatic approach can be applied to other languages where higher-level explicatures are basically explicit as in Japanese or implicit as in English.

Right from the outset, relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995) tried to define interpretation as a process of context elaboration. Interpretation is seen as a path of least effort leading to the selection of a set of most accessible assumptions. One of the central aspects of this context elaboration process lies in the fact that contextual assumptions are not randomly scattered in the hearer’s cognitive environment. Instead, relevance theory claims that there are some organising principles ordering contextual assumptions and determining which will be accessed first and, therefore, which will be retained as part of the optimally relevant interpretation.

The main organising principle is captured by the notion of manifestness, which combines two distinct properties of contextual assumptions: their accessibility and their strength in the cognitive environment. Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) define them as a function of the processing history of an assumption for the former and the confidence with which an assumption is held for the latter.

In this paper, I will explore the explanatory potential of manifestness by putting the notions of strength and accessibility to work on two current trends in pragmatic research, namely commitment (Ifantidou 2001; Boulat and Maillat 2017, 2023; Mazzarella et al. 2018; Bonalumi et al. 2020) and emotion (Moeschler 2009; Dezecache et al. 2013, 2015; Wharton and Strey 2019; Wilson and Carston 2019; Saussure and Wharton 2020; Wharton et al. 2021). My goal will be to show how these two dimensions of manifestness, as they were developed in the very early days of RT, can provide us with new theoretical insights in the study of human communication. In this paper, I will argue that, beyond their usefulness in providing a guiding principle for the comprehension procedure, the strength and accessibility of contextual assumptions can also advantageously shed light on other phenomena like commitment and emotions.

This paper offers an account of Polish addressative forms encoding deference and familiarity in terms of the relevance-theoretic notion of procedural meaning, which underlies a heterogeneous range of phenomena linked to different cognitive domains. The procedure encoded by pronouns used referentially can be seen as targeting the domain of inferential comprehension and contributing to the truth-conditional meaning of an utterance by identifying a referent of a pronoun. It is claimed here that addressative forms marking the politeness distinction encode another procedure, targeting the social cognition module and activating the hearer’s readiness to identify the form as (in)congruent with social norms. It is argued that the politeness element in addressative forms does not involve conceptual encoding. The potential of the T/V forms for giving rise to stylistic effects is also explored. It is suggested that the proposal can be extended to other languages with the T/V distinction.