| Description |
xiv, 382 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. |
| Summary |
"When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is a process of inference guided by precise xpectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics and the thoughts that humans are capable of entertaining and conveying? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations, metaphors and ironies? Is the ability to understand speakers' meanings rooted in a more general human ability to understand other minds? How do these abilities interact in evolution and in cognitive development? Meaning and Relevance sets out to answer these and other questions, enriching and updating relevance theory and exploring its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Contents |
Introduction: Pragmatics / Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson --The mapping between the mental and the public lexicon / Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson -- Truthfulness and relevance / Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber -- Rhetoric and relevance / Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson -- A deflationary account of metaphors / Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson -- Explaining irony / Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber -- Linguistic form and relevance / Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber -- Pragmatics and time / Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber -- Recent approaches to bridging: truth, coherence, relevance / Deirdre Wilson and Tomoko Matsui -- Mood and the analysis of non-declaritive sentences / Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber -- Metarepresentation in linguistic communication / Deirdre Wilson -- Pragmatics, modularity and mindreading / Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson -- Testing the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance / Jean-Baptiste Van Der Henst and Dan Sperber -- The why and how of experimental pragmatics: the case of 'scalar inferences' / Ira Noveck and Dan Sperber -- A pragmatic perspective on the evolution of language / Dan Sperber and Gloria Origgi. |
| Subject |
Semantics.
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Relevance.
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Inference.
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Cognition.
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| Alt Author |
Sperber, Dan.
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| ISBN |
9780521747486 (pbk.)
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0521747481 (pbk.)
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9780521766777 (hbk)
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052176677X (hbk)
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