New developments in relevance theory
Manuel Padilla Cruz, Agnieszka Piskorska · Pragmatics & Cognition · 2021
In 1986, Sperber and Wilson's Relevance: Communication and Cognition made a breakthrough in pragmatic research, shifting the spotlight from issues pertaining to discourse production and conversational interaction to cognitive phenomena underlying human communication.In their seminal 1986 book, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson sought to offer a comprehensive account of the inferential processes involved in utterance comprehension and how inferences are routinely made by the human mind in order to reach optimally relevant interpretations.Grounded on Gricean pragmatics, but yet reacting against it, relevance theory was soon applied to an enormous variety of linguistic phenomena, which include discourse/pragmatic markers, distinct types of adverbials and particles, and verbal mood, tense and aspect, to name but a few.It also contributed to a better understanding of the role of reformulations or phatic communication, how irony, figurative language and literary texts achieve their effects, how argumentation or media discourse fulfil their functions, or how humour originates.Moreover, relevance theory helped unravel the intricacies of phenomena like non-verbal communication, (im)politeness, misunderstanding, pragmatic development or language pathologies.As a result, it was soon welcomed as a necessary asset in fields as diverse as translation studies, historical linguistics and historical pragmatics, interlanguage or second language pragmatics, or instructional pragmatics.In 2022, this Special Issue of Pragmatics & Cognition comes as a reminder that the foundations of the model still hold strong, while the intervening years have seen a number of reconceptualizations and interesting developments within the theory.Deirdre Wilson made these developments possible through her sparkling intellectual inspiration flowing from her published works and personal encounters in a cascade of ideas put forth in conference presentations, seminars, informal discussions, emails, talking and engaging with enthusiasm in forms of open communication.It is impossible to enumerate all the topics that Deirdre Wilson has addressed in her individual or co-authored works, but the most prominent areas of her interest include the conceptual-procedural distinction, lexical pragmatics, metarepresentations, irony and parody, interpretation of literary texts, metonymy or weak cognitive effects, also referred to as non-propositional effects.