Linguists, philosophers and pragmatists have tended to stay close to those areas of meaning illuminated by semantics and logic. In this chapter we suggest that relevance theory offers a solution to this limiting view. We say a little about the context in which the framework was devised, present the main tenets of the theory itself and then explain the two theoretical advances which form the basis of our belief that it is uniquely positioned to accommodate the communication of affect and emotion. The first of these is the notion of non-conceptual or procedural meaning. The second involves two key innovations in relevance theory which result in theoretical divergences from post-Gricean and Neo-Gricean approaches. In the first of these, the relevance-theoretic informative intention is not characterised as an intention to modify the hearer’s thoughts directly. In the second, relevance theory does not attempt to draw the line Grice drew between showing and meaningNN and recognises both as instances of overt intentional communication. These two innovations result in the theory’s being able to accommodate extremely vague types of communication and, further, demonstrate that communicated information - whether clock-like or cloud-like - can be shown rather than merely meantNN.

The versatility of irony is evident in the variety of ways and places in which it is used. This chapter considers some of the complexities of ironic language on the internet (e.g., social media, messaging apps). Yus views irony as being associated with making a reference to some state of affairs that can be criticized or mocked, and which communicates a speaker’s attitudes toward that situation, including others who adopt a similar point of view. He embraces a “relevance theory” perspective to emphasize the prominence of echoic mention as a key source of pragmatic information when determining an ironic speaker’s dissociative attitude. Yus details the range of contextual information that enables successful irony use, even in situations where individuals do not share the same immediate physical space. This information includes widely held encyclopedic background knowledge, speaker-specific encyclopedic knowledge, previous utterances, particular linguistic cues, and information from the current physical setting. These different sources of contextual information are combined in specific ways to enable ironic meaning interpretation when people are not physical co-present (e.g., when posting messages or writing email on the internet).

Chapter 2 contains a detailed overview of Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory. Special attention is given to identifying their respective strengths and weaknesses, particularly with regard to questions about the semantics–pragmatics interface. This will allow for a more comprehensive understanding of the issues at hand and pave the way for a genuine integration of the two theories.

Chapter 5 concludes that combining Construction Grammar with Relevance Theory is advantageous. Merging these two frameworks amplifies their respective strengths, resulting in more precise and accurate descriptions of language use as well as a deeper understanding of the cognitive processes involved in verbal communication. It is shown how English modals serve as an effective testing ground of the new theoretical model that arises from this integration (Leclercq, 2023), and future research prospects are suggested.

Stage 7 of the journey moves to utterance meaning and to various ways of explaining how speakers communicate more than what the sentence says. It introduces the intention-and-inference-based concept of meaning in Grice’s and post-Gricean pragmatics, travelling though maxims, principles, and heuristics proposed by various scholars of this orientation. It then moves to introducing (i) approaches that advocate the ‘maximalist’, contextualist semantic content and (ii) semantic minimalism that preserves a much clearer boundary between semantics and pragmatics – suggesting ‘food for thought’ at many points in the discussion.

Furlong presents crime fiction writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes character. She uses Relevance Theory to examine how Holmes is adapted to Russian and Japanese culture, that is to say, what features of the original are being regarded as relevant both by the creator of an adaptation as well as by the audience, and what features the adaptations add to the source text and how these are related to the culture and sociopolitical situation in the receiving culture.

In this chapter, we introduce the main ideas behind relevance theory. We begin by considering how it developed out of the Gricean approach to pragmatics, and we look at how it differs from that approach. Relevance theory is a cognitive pragmatic theory of how we process utterances (and information) in context. The chapter begins with a discussion of relevance and cognition, and we outline the relevance-theoretic characterisation of context. This then leads us to a definition of what it means for something to be relevant, and we introduce the two principles which drive the relevance-theoretic approach to utterance interpretation. When information is intentionally communicated (both in utterances and in other forms of communication), we say it is ostensive. Ostensive communication is, according to relevance theory, special. It raises expectations of how relevant it will be for the addressee, and this has important consequences for how we process information and how we understand utterance interpretation. We will see that this leads us to the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure which describes how we go about processing intentionally communicated information.

Relevance Theory is a cognitive pragmatic theory devoted to utterance interpretation. Its main assumption is that linguistic communication is guided by the communicative principle of relevance, which states that the addressee is invited to take the speaker’s contribution as optimally relevant. In intracultural communication, the crucial point is to understand how communication succeeds, since its success depends not on a complete linguistic decoding but rather on accessing the relevant contextual assumptions; that is, the assumptions that are closest to the speaker’s informative intention. This chapter’s first aim is to elucidate both how Relevance Theory is included in Grice’s legacy, and how it diverges from Grice. Its second aim is to discuss the place of Relevance Theory in pragmatics today, and more specifically to explore whether Relevance Theory makes different predictions than do neo-Gricean approaches. Its third aim is to give insights into Relevance Theory’s contributions to the intercultural pragmatics agenda, and in particular to discuss how Relevance Theory converges with but also diverges from the intercultural pragmatics paradigm initiated by Kecskes in 2014.

In this chapter, I consider the cognitive linguistic, relevance theoretic andgraded salience approaches to utterance interpretation. What they have incommon is that they view indirectness as a graded notion, not defined interms of a relationship between a sentence and a type of SA.

Chapter 3 provides an overview of two influential pragmatic approaches to reference: Accessibility theory and the Givenness Hierarchy. Both accounts have been claimed to be compatible with relevance theory. However, it has also been claimed relevance theory alone cannot account for the full range of data and that these auxiliary scales of activation are necessary additions. In this chapter these claims are examined, and some objections are raised. The more general objections relate to the nature of the relevance-theoretic approach to utterance interpretation and how scales of encoded activation might fit with this. More specific objections relate to how the activation scale accounts deal with stylistic or so-called special uses of referring expressions. Finally, some examples of proper names in English are briefly discussed to illustrate how highly context sensitive the choices made by speakers can be, and to demonstrate the crucial role played by considerations of style and genre.

Chapter 5 presents a fully procedural analysis of personal pronouns in English. Pronouns, it is argued encode procedures which operate at a sub-personal level. Features including gender, number and person features function purely syntactically and do not contribute directly to the semantics of the overall message. That is, they are not conceptual. Rather, the cognitive processes triggered by use of a pronoun function to constrain potential referents to a sub-personally identifiable set. The differences in interpretation that arise when a speaker chooses to place contrastive prosodic stress on a pronoun are discussed, along with examples where the choice of pronoun does not play a role in reference resolution but contributes to other aspects of the speaker’s overall meaning. The discussion focuses specifically on the communication of expressive effects and has significance not just for our understanding of pronouns, but for our understanding of procedural meaning more generally.

Chapter 4 outlines a procedural relevance-based analysis of the definite determiner the. The definite article, it is argued, signals to the hearer that he should seek out an existing conceptual file on which to resolve reference. The indefinite article, on the other hand, instructs the hearer to open a new conceptual file. As interpretation proceeds, the hearer seeks to align the conceptual content within the nominal of the definite description with that in the target conceptual file. This approach to the contribution that definite descriptions make to speaker meaning is then applied to cases of misdescription and, it is claimed, it also offers fresh perspective on the referential–attributive distinction. Finally, stylistic effects which may arise from the choice and content of definite descriptions are discussed.