Tag: Grice

M&R Ch. 3: Truthfulness and relevance

Posted onAuthorBrian Larson1 Comment

This is my colleague Chris Cocchiarella’s summary of the third 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. Having explained the meaning of inferential pragmatics in Chapter 1 and word-concept relationships in Chapter Read More …

Basic definitions and concepts from Relevance Theory

Posted onAuthorBrian Larson8 Comments

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 …