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This book offers a fresh take on several long-standing issues relating to the (non-)truth-conditional interpretation of epistemic, evidential, hearsay and attitudinal sentence adverbials. Drawing on a wealth of data from English and German, it shows for the first time that all four adverbial classes can have both truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional (parenthetical) readings. A novel account is presented according to which (non-)truth-conditional readings may arise at either the syntactic or the pragmatic level. Couched in relevance theory, the book also re-examines the explicature and illocutionary status of the adverbial qualification and the qualified proposition, and refines the notions of pointhood and at-issueness to provide an original information-structural analysis applicable to not just sentence adverbials but a range of other propositional qualifiers. Finally, the investigation identifies five factors affecting (non-)truth-conditional interpretation: linear position, prosody, the semantics of the adverbial, its information-structural properties and the wider context. The book will be of interest to those interested in relevance theory, the semantics/pragmatics interface, the syntax/pragmatics interface and information structure, as well as for syntacticians, semanticists and pragmatists interested in sentence adverbials, other propositional qualifiers and parentheticality, syntactic and interpretational.

The chapters in this volume apply the methodology of relevance theory to develop accounts of various pragmatic phenomena which can be associated with the broadly conceived notion of style. Some of them are devoted to central cases of figurative language (metaphor, metonymy, puns, irony) while others deal with issues not readily associated with figurativeness (from multimodal communicative stimuli through strong and weak implicatures to discourse functions of connectives, particles and participles). Other chapters shed light on the use of specific communicative styles, ranging from hate speech to humour and humorous irony. Using the relevance-theoretic toolkit to analyse a spectrum of style-related issues, this volume makes a case for the model of pragmatics founded upon inference and continuity, understood as the non-existence of sharply delineated boundaries between classes of communicative phenomena.

Relevance drives our actions and channels our attention; it shapes how we make sense of the world and communicate with each other. Irrelevance spreads a twilight which blurs the line between information we do not want to access and information we cannot access. In disciplines as diverse as philosophy, sociology, the information sciences and linguistics, “relevance” has been proposed as a key concept. This book is the first to bring together the often unrelated traditions. Researchers from different fields discuss relevance and relate it to the challenges of “irrelevance”, which have so far been neglected despite their significance for our chances of making well-informed decisions and understanding others. The contributions focus on theoretical and conceptual questions, on specific factors and fields, and on practical and political implications of relevance and irrelevance as forces which are even stronger when they remain in the background.

How hearers arrive at intended meaning, which elements encode processing instructions in certain languages, how procedural meaning and prosody interact, how diverse types of utterances are interpreted, how epistemic vigilance mechanisms work, which linguistic elements assist those mechanisms, how a critical attitude to information and informers develops when a second language is learnt, or why some perlocutionary effects originate are some of the varied issues that have intrigued pragmatists, and relevance theorists in particular, and continue to fuel research. In this collection readers will discover new proposals based on the cognitive framework put forward by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson three decades ago. Their gripping, insightful and stimulating discussions, combined in some cases with meticulous and in-depth analyses, show the directions relevance theory has recently followed. Moreover, this collection also unveils fruitful and promising interactions with areas like morphology, prosody, language typology, interlanguage pragmatics, machine translation, or rhetoric and argumentation, and avenues for future research.

This volume is one of the first books to present a comprehensive view of lexical pragmatics, describing its origins, assumptions, scope, methodology and the various approaches to it, focusing specifically on the approach offered by relevance theory. In addition to theoretical considerations, the book discusses particular linguistic expressions and pragmatic phenomena, showing how the relevance-theoretic tools may be used to explore pragmatically motivated changes to lexically encoded meanings. The most recent developments are discussed and questions are asked to indicate directions for further research within this rapidly developing field.

This book seeks to explain how discourse types influence the addressee's understanding of the communicator's intention. Examining global coherence-based accounts as well as proposals based on Gricean pragmatics, it argues that the key to a solution lies in the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance proposed by Sperber & Wilson.