Category: Linguistics

M&R Ch 7: Linguistic form and relevance

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This is my colleague Chris Cocchiarella’s summary of the seventh chapter of Wilson and Sperber’s (2012) Meaning and Relevance. We previously posted Chris’s summary of the book’s preface, an intro to some of the terms and concepts of Relevance Theory, and a his summary of the introductory Chapter 1. All the other chapters  before the present one have also received summaries. (Click on the “Relevance Theory” tag link on any of these, and you’ll get the whole list.) I also posted a claim that Relevance Theory matters to rhetoric and TC. With the chapter, the job of writing summaries passes to me; wish me luck! Chapter Read More …

M&R Chapter 1–Introduction: Pragmatics

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This is my colleague Chris Cocchiarella’s summary of the first chapter of Wilson and Sperber’s (2012) Meaning and Relevance. We previously posted a summary of the book’s preface and an intro to some of the terms and concepts of Relevance Theory. I also posted a claim that Relevance Theory matters to rhetoric and TC. This summary has two parts: part I explains the basics of Relevance Theory (RT for short); part II teases out some implications of RT (especially for professionals in rhetoric and technical communication) and then concludes the summary. I. Basics of RT While Sperber and Wilson define Read More …

Meaning and Relevance: Preface

Posted onAuthorBrian Larson8 Comments

Here is Chris Cocchiarella’s summary of the preface of Wilson & Sperber’s Meaning and Relevance. This is part of a series of posts discussing intersections between Relevance Theory (RT) and rhetoric. For an overview of this project, see this post; for definitions of terms and concepts from RT, see this post. -Brian Under various theoretical influences, from Classical and modern rhetoric to philosophical hermeneutics and linguistic pragmatics, the rhetorical tradition and its practical offshoots such as technical communication have been concerned with the nature of interpretation, which roughly may be defined as the art or skill of expounding or translating Read More …

Basic definitions and concepts from Relevance Theory

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To assist readers following our series of posts on Wilson and Sperber’s Meaning and Relevance (2012), and to assist us, too by providing a place to refer to in future posts for definitions of terms, I’m posting here a summary of a book chapter W&S published in 2006: Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (2006). Relevance theory. In L. Horn & G. Ward (Eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics (pp. 607–632). Wiley-Blackwell. Wilson and Sperber describe relevance theory as “a cognitive psychological theory” (p. 625). This chapter provides an introduction of the theory as W&S currently espouse it. It differs in some Read More …

Is Relevance Theory relevant to rhetoric?

Posted onAuthorBrian Larson12 Comments

Chris Cocchiarella and I are working on a book review of Meaning and Relevance (M&R), the 2012 collection of scholarly essays in linguistic pragmatics by Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber, who present relevance theory (RT), a cognitive, as opposed to merely linguistic, theory of communication.  By a ‘cognitive’ theory, they mean not only the process of decoding meaning, which would be a purely ‘linguistic’ theory, but also the parallel process of inferential comprehension, which involves constructing conceptual representations of meaning based on adjusting linguistic codes to a cognitive environment.  Wilson and Sperber’s most complete treatment of the subject prior to Read More …

The Phenomenology of Error

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I received a link from friend and colleague Trent Kays to this article: Williams, J. M. (1981). The phenomenology of error. College Composition and Communication, 32(2), 152-168. (I UPDATED this post 11/22 with notes from Prof. Sihler below.) It’s a good read, and points up a key problem: Self-appointed arbiters of writing style, unofficial state grammarians, and teachers of writing often feel compelled to point out errors in the writings of others. Unfortunately, an “error” may not really be one, because most readers would not react to it that way. And the grammar police themselves commit similar or identical errors Read More …

Tripped up by “structuralism”

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In what is likely to be another blow to my classroom ethos, I need to correct an error I introduced into the discussion in 5531 Composition Pedagogy last Wednesday. A classmate asked about what “structuralism” is. I confidently described it as arising from the linguistics of the Frenchman Ferdinand de Saussure, embodied famously in the work of the Prague School (a movement, not an institution) of linguistic theory, a leading figure of which was Roman Jacobson. So far, so good. But then I characterized it roughly as the notion that we can understand a subject (like language or culture) by Read More …