Editorial: Relevance Theory and Intercultural Communication Problems

This editorial to the special issue of RiL dedicated to relevance theory and problems of intercultural communication addresses the general requirements that a theory of communication must meet to be applicable to the analysis of intercultural communication. Then it discusses criticism levelled against Grice’s theory of conversational implicature and Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness on the grounds that these theories were not universal enough to be applied to all data. Finally, it offers some remarks on the applicability of relevance theory to intercultural pragmatics

Communication in relevance theory

Sperber and Wilson (1995) ground their definition of communication on their criticism of Grice's intentional definition of non-natural meaning. In such a perspective, communication is considered as an act rather than as a process. Sperber and Wilson propose two definitions of this fundamental concept. In a first time, they argue that communication involves two specific intentions; afterwards, they equate it with ostension. This paper examines and criticizes their proposals, confronting them to ordinary intuition. Some crucial issues are discussed: the equivalence of Sperber and Wilson's two definitions, the nature of the evidence used in communication, the intentionality of communication, the content of the communicative intention, the notion of mutual manifestness, and the problem of infinite regress.Research supported by Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (Belgium)

Relevance Theory and Translation

Linguistic theory and translation theory both deal with language; however, they rarely meet or use each other's results in order to advance their individual areas of research. Linguists often seem to look at translation as either trade or art rather than science, and translators show cynicism about linguistic inquiry ignoring real language data. This paper focuses on one particular area of concern in both linguistics and translation: how to incorporate pragmatics into an explanation of which translation or interpretation is best for a given linguistic expression in a given linguistic and extra-linguistic context? Students in practical translation classes do not appreciate explanations along the lines "this is simply how you would say it in language X" or "this is what the speakers of X would say in this situation". Speakers of X are balancing their knowledge of rules and conventions of language use with pragmatic know-how; they are making choices that translators - both human and machine - are supposed to imitate in the target language context. We present several examples and discuss how Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory could claim translational explanatory adequacy in its handling of the "division of labour" between codal knowledge and inferencing

Outline of Relevance Theory

No abstract

Relevance theory and language change

This paper considers how ideas developed within relevance theory can be applied in accounting for language change. It briefly surveys previous relevance-theoretic work on language change and suggests that studies of procedural meaning, lexical pragmatics and metarepresentation can each play an important role in accounting for semantic change. It identifies a number of areas for further research which could help to develop understanding of both relevance theory and language change and suggests that one important line of further research would be to explore connections between work in relevance theory and approaches which adopt terms and ideas from the theory without adopting the relevance-theoretic framework overall

Social Effects: a Relevance Theory Perspective

[Abstract] Many linguists have claimed that interlocutors transmit social information about their identities or relationships when interacting (e.g. Lakoff, 1973; Laver, 1974, 1975; Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987; Scollon and Scollon, 1995; Coupland, 2000). However, they have not explained how this information is transmitted and recovered. Based on relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986, 1995; Wilson and Sperber, 2002), this paper argues that speakers transmit such social information implicitly and that hearers can recover it as a consequence of their expectations of relevance. The stylistic choices made by speakers can lead hearers to recover implicatures that they can use to obtain a specific type of cognitive effect referring to different aspects of the speakers’ personality or their relationship

The Treatment of Geographical Dialect in Literary Translation from the Perspective of Relevance Theory

This paper discusses problems involved in the translation of literary works that apply linguistic varieties, especially geographical dialects. It surveys selected approaches to the functions of dialects in literature and to the strategies of dealing with linguistic variation in translation, arguing that the understanding of the issue may be deepened and systematized by applying notions drawn from relevance theory. The use of dialect in literary texts is interpreted as a communicative clue and the translators′ approach to its rendering is described with reference to the cognitive environment of the recipients and the balance of processing effort and communicative gain. Examples are drawn from the Polish translations of The Secret Garden by F.H. Burnett, the oldest coming from 1917 and the newest from 2012, which highlight the translators′ changing assumptions on the recipients′ cognitive environment reflected in the choice of the strategy of dialect rendition

A CONCEPT OF GENERAL MEANING: SELECTED THEORIES IN COMPARISON TO SELECTED SEMANTIC AND PRAGMATIC THEORIES

The paper discusses a concept of general meaning with reference to various relevant semantic and pragmatic theories. It includes references to Slavic axiological semantics (e.g. Krzeszowski (1997); Puzynina (1992)), Wierzbicka’s (e.g. 1980, 1987) atomic expressions and classical pragmatics theories, such as speech acts, Gricean theory of conversational implicature, politeness theory and and relevance theory