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Relevance
Theory
Recent developments, current
challenges and future directions
edi t ed by
Manuel Padilla Cruz
John Benjamins Publishing Company

Relevance Theory
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&bns)
issn 0922-842X
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and
its Companion Series. The New Series offers a selection of high quality work
covering the full richness of Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field, within
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For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
http://benjamins.com/catalog/pbns
Editor Associate Editor

Anita Fetzer Andreas H. Jucker
University of Augsburg University of Zurich
Founding Editors
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University of Southern Belgian National Science Belgian National Science
Denmark Foundation, Universities of Foundation,
Louvain and Antwerp University of Antwerp
Editorial Board
Robyn Carston Sachiko Ide Deborah Schiffrin
University College London Japan Women’s University Georgetown University
Thorstein Fretheim Kuniyoshi Kataoka Paul Osamu Takahara
University of Trondheim Aichi University Kobe City University of
Miriam A. Locher Foreign Studies
John C. Heritage
University of California at Los Universität Basel Sandra A. Thompson
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Barcelona
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University of Trieste Yunxia Zhu
The University of Queensland
Volume 268
Relevance Theory. Recent developments, current challenges and future directions
Edited by Manuel Padilla Cruz
Relevance Theory
Recent developments, current challenges
and future directions
Edited by
Manuel Padilla Cruz
University of Seville
John Benjamins Publishing Company

Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
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the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence

of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
doi 10.1075/pbns.268
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Table of contents
Introduction: Three decades of relevance theory 1

Manuel Padilla Cruz
Part I. Issues on procedural meaning and procedural analyses
The speaker’s derivational intention 33

Thorstein Fretheim
Cracking the chestnut: How intonation interacts with procedural

meaning in Colloquial Singapore English lah 59
Junwen Lee and Chonghyuck Kim
Reference assignment in pronominal argument languages:

A relevance-theoretic perspective 81
Helga Schröder
Conceptual and procedural information for verb tense disambiguation:

The English Simple Past 103
Cristina Grisot, Bruno Cartoni and Jacques Moeschler
Part II. Discourse issues
Relevance theory and contextual sources-centred analysis of irony:

Current research and compatibility 147
Francisco Yus
Distinguishing rhetorical from ironical questions:

A relevance-theoretic account 173
Thierry Raeber
vi Relevance Theory
Part III. Interpretive processes
Relevance theory, epistemic vigilance and pragmatic competence 193

Elly Ifantidou
Evidentials, genre and epistemic vigilance 239

Christoph Unger
Part IV. Rhetorical and perlocutionary effects of communication
Rhetoric and cognition: Pragmatic constraints on argument processing 261

Steve Oswald
Perlocutionary effects and relevance theory 287

Agnieszka Piskorska
Conclusion: Some directions for future research

in relevance-theoretic pragmatics 307
Manuel Padilla Cruz
Contributors 321
Index 325
Introduction
Three decades of relevance theory
Manuel Padilla Cruz

University of Seville
Almost three decades have elapsed since the publication of Dan Sperber and
Deirdre Wilson’s (1986) seminal and most influential book Relevance. Communi-
cation and Cognition, and exactly two since the publication of its second edition
(Sperber and Wilson 1995). In them, the authors presented and revised a series of
claims and principles about human verbal communication and the foundational
postulates of what is now known as ‘relevance theory’. Over all these years, their
two books and numerous subsequent publications have given rise to a strand of
research in pragmatics with a psychological basis and cognitive orientation. Often
alluded to as ‘relevance-theoretic pragmatics’, this strand seeks to unravel how
the mind processes utterances – and, more widely, discourse – the contribution
of diverse linguistic elements (e.g., discourse markers, particles, adverbials, into-
nation, etc.) to comprehension, why the mind arrives at a particular interpreta-
tion and the effects that may follow from understanding utterances in one way or
another.
Relevance theory has certainly awoken the interest of many pragmatists and
linguists in general by posing many intriguing problems and thought-provoking
questions. Relevance theorists’ continuous challenging of often-taken-for-granted
assumptions, claims, generalisations, and even whole models, has also brought
fresher air to those disciplines. Indeed, they have analysed in depth a wide varie-
ty of linguistic and communicative phenomena from a different perspective and
with a new theoretical apparatus, which has shed much light onto underexplored
or overlooked issues.
This book celebrates these happiest anniversaries and, most importantly, the
fact that relevance theory still continues to appeal to researchers, who find in it a
very valuable model for understanding the intricacies of linguistic communica-
tion. This is a collection of papers, which very sincerely acknowledges the exten-
sive work carried out not only by the authors of the theory themselves, but also by
a large number of researchers who have elaborated on some of its postulates and
distinctions, empirically tested some of its predictions or applied the theory to
diverse domains or neighbouring fields, thus expanding its scope. Consequently,
doi 10.1075/pbns.268.01cru
© 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company
2 Manuel Padilla Cruz
a tribute of deepest gratitude is paid to all of them for their brave efforts to answer
questions related to an incredibly complex human activity.
Ten papers are collected here. Five of them elaborate on issues that have tra-
ditionally concerned practitioners in relevance theory: the intentional nature
of communication, how speakers guide hearers to recover intended meaning,
how specific types of utterances or linguistic elements are interpreted, or the
consequences of communication. Nonetheless, these papers present recent de-
velopments in these areas and show how relevance theorists have faced various
challenges therein. Other two papers apply the relevance-theoretic apparatus to
account for features of some linguistic varieties or languages, thus helping to un-
derstand how they are structured and function. In so doing, these two papers also
show interesting applications of relevance theory to other linguistic disciplines.
The remaining three papers also present some of the new directions that the the-
ory is following, as they consider epistemic vigilance mechanisms (Mascaro and
Sperber 2009; Sperber et al. 2010). More precisely, those papers also address the
interaction of some linguistic elements with such mechanisms, explain their role
in rhetoric and argumentation, or consider their importance in second language
teaching and acquisition. Thus, these papers also suggest interesting collaboration
between relevance theory and fields like argumentation studies or interlanguage
pragmatics. Finally, the book concludes with a chapter that suggests further pos-
sible future directions for research in relevance-theoretic pragmatics.
These works offer new insights and seek to fuel what can be considered an
authentic revolution in pragmatics, particularly in its cognitive branch, which
had scarcely been convulsed since the various publications on meaning and com-
munication by philosopher of language Herbert Paul Grice. Although most of
the chapters summarise essential postulates and explain the key notions they rely
on, in what follows Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) views on communication,
underlying assumptions, fundamental claims and basic concepts are presented.
Since many readers will surely be familiarised with them, the following section
is simply intended as a reminder. For those novel to the theory, this discussion
supplies the necessary background that enables them to conveniently understand
the works gathered here, as well as what relevance theory has meant. Next comes
a review of research done in various areas from a relevance-theoretic perspective,
which helps situate the chapters of this book in the wider panorama of relevance-
theoretic pragmatics. Finally, this introductory chapter is closed with a descrip-
tion of the chapters.
Three decades of relevance theory 3
1. The relevance-theoretic revolution
In a field like linguistics, where most theories, models and frameworks have been
constantly revised, refined, questioned and eventually abandoned in favour of
others, referring to the contribution made by a particular one as a ‘revolution’
might sound presumptuous and even biased. Undeniably, proponents of new the-
ories, models and frameworks have always been encouraged by a perennial and
daring interest in unraveling how linguistic systems are organised and how they
work at the service of communication, as well as in overcoming limitations in
prior approaches. In a relatively young discipline like pragmatics, scholars have
incessantly attempted to grasp the enormous complexity of human verbal com-
munication, where linguistic systems are put to use to convey information and
achieve goals that may crucially impact on human relationships, and the outputs
of such systems have to be processed by an until fairly recently practically un-
known mechanism like the human mind.
Relevance theory originated as an exciting endeavour to find convincing an-
swers to a series of only apparently simple and obvious questions for which many
pragmatists could have thought there were final answers:
– How do humans understand each other?

– How do we arrive at a particular interpretation of what others say?
– What makes us end up with a specific interpretation of an utterance?
– Why do we select or reject an interpretation?
In their search for answers to these questions, Sperber and Wilson challenged
many tacitly accepted assumptions about how languages are used, how the hu-
man mind works and what might happen in it while processing input. Thus, they
seriously questioned the code model of communication, which was deeply en-
trenched in the western linguistic tradition, and showed its many drawbacks, gaps
and inconsistencies.
Some progress had been made when the role of inference in communication
was taken into consideration. Indeed, the also influential work by Grice (1957,
1975) – wherein relevance theory is rooted and to which it is greatly indebted –
meant a huge leap. However, Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) went well beyond
the so-called Gricean pragmatics by proposing a model that draws from valuable
insights from disciplines such as philosophy of mind, developmental psychology
or cognitive anthropology, to name but some. Thus, relevance theory incorporat-
ed some of their notions and views to pragmatics in order to offer a profoundly
cognitive, psychological perspective that has implications for the nature and role
of semantics and pragmatics.
1.1 Intention, manifestness and cognitive environments
Like Grice (1975), Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) conceive of communication

as an intentional activity, in which the speaker is prompted by two intentions:
(i) her informative intention, which is her desire to make manifest to the audience
a particular set of assumptions, and (ii) her communicative intention, which is her
desire that the audience recognise that she actually has a particular informative
intention. Recognising these two intentions requires theory of mind abilities – i.e.,
being able to attribute mental states to other individuals – and, therefore, me-
tarepresenting the intentions and beliefs of others – i.e., creating representations
of other public or private representations (Apperly 2012). These abilities make it
possible for individuals to understand whether the communicator believes what
she says is true – first-order mental states – or what the communicator knows the
audience know, what the communicator intends the audience to believe, or what
the communicator believes the audience believe – second-order mental states
(Leekam 1991; Happé 1994; Sullivan et al. 1995; Sullivan et al. 2003; Wilson 2013).
These layers of metarepresentation can be depicted as follows (Sperber 1994: 195):
Speaker intends (attribution of communicative intention – 4)
me to know (communicative intention – 3)
that she intends (attribution of informative intention – 2)
me to believe (informative intention – 1)
that p
The notion of manifestness is a remarkable innovation. A certain fact or assump-

tion is manifest to an individual at a certain time if that individual is capable of
creating a mental representation of it and accepting that representation as true or
probably true (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 39). The set of facts or assumptions of
which an individual actually has a mental representation at a certain moment, or
of which he may potentially form a mental representation, make up his cognitive
environment. If two (or more) individuals are capable of forming similar, though
not completely identical, representations of the same physical or psychological
objects, those individuals share a mutual cognitive environment.
Through the notion of manifestness Sperber and Wilson (1995: 18) over-
come the drawbacks of notions like common knowledge (Lewis 1969) or mutual
knowledge (Schiffer 1972), which implied that, for communication to succeed,
individuals should mutually share a certain amount of knowledge. It is virtually
impossible to distinguish the amount (and type) of knowledge that two (or more)
individuals merely share from the knowledge that is truly mutual. Perceptual sys-
tems and cognitive mechanisms act like filters and greatly determine what indi-
viduals perceive and how they represent it. What is more, checking that two (or
more) individuals actually share some knowledge would require time-consuming

and almost never-ending mental operations.
However, the innovativeness of relevance theory does not end here. Though
sharing the Gricean view of communication as an intentional activity, Sperber
and Wilson also react against some of Grice’s (1957, 1975) own ideas by arguing
that, instead of the Cooperative Principle, two other general principles govern hu-
man cognition and communication.
1.2 A theory based on two general principles
Although based on Gricean pragmatics, relevance theory builds on it by rejecting

some of its foundational postulates. Grice (1957, 1975) claimed that the Cooper-
ative Principle and a series of maxims – those of quantity, quality, relevance and
manner – govern communication. Communicators may abide by, covertly violate
or blatantly flout those maxims in order to convey implicit contents and achieve
certain effects. Also, Grice (1975) acknowledged the existence of other maxims of
a social or aesthetic nature, such as that of politeness, which led to some adherents
to his ideas to elaborate on those maxims and suggest different models to account
for (im)politeness (e.g., Lakoff 1973; Leech 1983). Others, in turn, modified the
number or raised the status of the original maxims to that of principles (e.g., Horn
1996; Levinson 2000), thus giving rise to neo-Gricean approaches. However, the
Cooperative Principle and its maxims seemed to be based on intuitions about
communication and observations of a series of regularities.
Relevance theory, in contrast, is a post-Gricean model; it questions the ex-
istence of the Cooperative Principle and its maxims, since their origin is unclear,
they do not seem to have universal validity and their operation seems to have
different effects depending on circumstances (Wilson and Sperber 1991a: 381,
1991b: 586). If anything, the Gricean Principle and maxims would have the status
of (cultural) norms, understood as “[…] internalised, unconscious patterns that
the individual follows without even noticing that he is complying with an unwrit-
ten model” (Escandell Vidal 2004: 349).
Relying on a constant tendency that has propelled the evolution of the human
species in general and the human mind in particular and greatly contributed to
its efficiency – maximisation of gain in exchange of effort invested – Sperber and
Wilson reject the Cooperative Principle and its maxims and propose two very
general principles that govern communication and cognition.1 Indeed, by ‘prin-
ciple’ they understand a formalization of how a particular system works; in other
1. In their 1986 work Sperber and Wilson only proposed a single principle.
words, a “[…] causal, mechanical explanation” (Escandell Vidal 2004: 349). These
two principles are the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance. The
former states that human cognition is geared towards the maximization of rele-
vance and is argued to reflect how the human mind functions. The latter, in turn,
claims that every act of intentional communication communicates a presumption
of its own optimal relevance. This second principle operates in all cases of inten-
tional communication and is responsible for the selection of an interpretation out
of the many possible ones that an utterance may have:
Communicators and audience need no more know the principle of relevance to
communicate that they need to know the principles of genetics to reproduce.
Communicators do not ‘follow’ the principle of relevance; and they could not
violate it even if they wanted to. The principle of relevance applies without excep-
tion […] It is not the general principle, but the fact that a particular presumption
of relevance has been communicated by and about a particular act of communi-
cation, that the audience uses in inferential comprehension.
(Sperber and Wilson 1995: 162)
These two new principles are based on the notion of ‘relevance’, which is the true
cornerstone of the theory. Sperber and Wilson also characterise this notion in
more precise terms than Grice (1957, 1975) actually did.
1.3 An underlying key notion
Grice (1975) included the maxim of relation and worded it as “be relevant”, but
unfortunately he did not define what he took ‘relevance’ to be, nor did he clearly
explain its role in communication. In contrast, Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995)
portray relevance as a property of the stimuli individuals produce and, there-
fore, of a very special sub-set thereof: utterances. They define it on the basis of
two factors:
a. The positive cognitive effects that information yields, or the improvements

to our mental representation of the world or set of beliefs about it. Those
improvements may be strengthening of previous beliefs, contradiction and
eventual rejection of those beliefs or the formation of new beliefs from the
interaction of previous ones with new information.
b. The processing or cognitive effort required by an item of information. This
depends on the complexity of the linguistic form of the utterance that con-
veys that item of information (i.e., its syntactic structure, lexical items, etc.)
or the effort of memory needed to retrieve or select a suitable context for
processing it.
These two factors are also essential for understanding what the presumption of
optimal relevance involves: (i) utterances will normally be relevant enough – i.e.,
they will result in enough cognitive effects – for the hearer to decide to invest the
cognitive effort necessary to process them, and (ii) the formulation of utterances
will normally be the one the speaker thinks, given her abilities and preferenc-
es, will result in a satisfactory amount of cognitive effects (Sperber and Wilson
1995: 270). The first part of this presumption means that hearers normally expect
some cognitive reward which they cannot obtain otherwise, i.e., positive cognitive
effects or “[…] a worthwhile difference to [their] representation of the world […]”
(Wilson and Sperber 2002: 251). In turn, the second part means that the speaker
will normally be interested in producing utterances that are easily comprehensible
and provide the hearer with enough evidences for the intended cognitive effects
or additional cognitive effects rendering utterances optimally relevant (Wilson
and Sperber 2002: 256–257). Nevertheless, the speaker’s performance will depend
on her own cognitive skills and capabilities, which may be conditioned by absent-
mindedness, tiredness, boredom, etc., and her goals, among which is complying
with norms dictating, for instance, register, amount or type of information to dis-
pense, formality, etc. (Mazzarella 2013: 33–35).
In addition to the two principles of relevance, Sperber and Wilson (1995: 166)
initially proposed a criterion of consistency with the principle of relevance, accord-
ing to which an interpretation is consistent with the principle of relevance if, and
only if, the speaker expects it to be optimally relevant. This means that, if the
hearer finds an interpretative hypothesis optimally relevant, he should not think
that the speaker intended a particular utterance to be optimally relevant under
another interpretation. The hearer will think that an interpretative hypothesis was
intended upon checking that it yields enough cognitive effects that offset a rea-
sonable amount of cognitive effort.
By clearly defining relevance and arguing that the constant search for optimal
relevance governs human cognition and communication, Sperber and Wilson go
well beyond Gricean pragmatics. However, as pointed out, relevance theory also
reacts against the well-established code model of communication. Indeed, Sperber
and Wilson conceive of communication as a human activity requiring a great
amount inference, which has significant implications for understanding the role
of semantics and pragmatics.
1.4 A new conception of communication
The code model metaphorically depicted communication as a process in which

the code enables the speaker to package her thoughts (i.e., encoding) in a parcel
(i.e., utterance) and send it over to the hearer (i.e., articulating and speaking). The
hearer’s task is to open that parcel and match the encoded input to correspond-
ing semantic representations (i.e., decoding) in order to decipher, so to say, what
the speaker means. However, the code alone does not suffice to arrive at speaker
meaning: not everything that the speaker means is encoded and there is no guar-
antee that the hearer interprets what she means correctly (Wilson and Sperber
1991b: 584–585; Sperber and Wilson 1995: 27).
Hearers have to segment sounds and delimit words; parse and disambiguate
constituents; narrow or broaden concepts; assign reference to some expressions;
recover elided linguistic material; determine the attitude the speaker projects to-
wards the proposition expressed, her degree of certainty about it or if she is per-
forming a certain action, and supply any assumption that is necessary for arriving
at implicit contents. All these tasks rely on inference, so Sperber and Wilson
(1987: 698, 1995: 10) opt for describing communication as an ostensive-inferential
activity. It is ‘ostensive’ because the speaker shows something to the hearer – an
utterance, which is indirect evidence for her communicative intention – and uses
it to attract and direct the hearer’s attention to something: her informative inten-
tion. Communication is ‘inferential’ because the hearer has to work out the speak-
er’s meaning and her underlying intention when drawing the hearer’s attention.2
Grice (1957, 1975) emphasised the reliance of communication on inference,
but he envisaged its role as limited to the determination of the spatio-tempo-
ral coordinates of an utterance, assignment of reference to some expressions and
recovery of the implicit contents. Accordingly, hearers arrive at ‘what is said’
through decoding and very little inference, while arriving at ‘what is implied’
greatly depend on inference. This unveils a view of the role of semantics and prag-
matics in communication in which the former contributes to the recovery of the
proposition expressed, while the latter was crucial for arriving at implicit contents
(Wilson and Sperber 1993: 3). On the contrary, by proving that inference inter-
venes in all the tasks listed above, Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) present a more
intricate picture of comprehension where pragmatic processes are indispensable
for the recovery of explicit content.
Showing that communication involves much more than an encoding-
decoding process also leads Sperber and Wilson to contend that individuals may
use utterances in order not to simply pack and send over their own thoughts. By
means of utterances communicators may reproduce words or phrases, represent
diverse states of affairs and even allude to the thoughts of other people.
2. As a cognitive-pragmatic model, relevance theory focuses on comprehension and aims to

account for how hearers arrive at speaker’s meaning through a series of simultaneous infer-
ential tasks. This should not mean that Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) are not aware of the
crucial role that inference plays in production.
1.5 Utterances as metarepresentations
Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) believe that individuals can employ any natural
or artificial phenomenon in order to represent another phenomenon it some-
how resembles in certain respects. By means of utterances, which are public rep-
resentations – i.e., perceptible, audible – individuals represent their own private,
mental representations. Moreover, utterances may represent existing or desirable
states of affairs or the thoughts or representations that an individual thinks an-
other individual, or group of individuals, entertains. This is the basis for Sperber
and Wilson’s (1995: 228–232) distinction between descriptive and interpretive di-
mensions of language usage.
Since utterances are representations of representations, they have metarep-
resentational uses (Noh 2000). One of these is metalinguistic, when utterances
publicly reproduce other public representations like words, phrases or utteranc-
es, or their logical or conceptual content. Clear examples are direct speech and
quotations. Another metarepresentational use is interpretive, when utterances
publicly resemble other public or private representations, like other utterances or
thoughts. A typical example is indirect speech.
Furthermore, if utterances metarepresent the thoughts or utterances that (an)
other individual(s) entertain(s) or say(s), they are used attributively or function
as attributive metarepresentations, as the source of those thoughts or utterances
can be identified more or less easily (Wilson 1999: 148). In contrast, if utterances
only represent a word, phrase or sentence produced by an unidentifiable source,
they work as non-attributive metarepresentations. Examples of non-attributive
metarepresentations are (Wilson and Sperber 1988; Wilson 1999):
a. Negative and disjunctive sentences, which metarepresent possible informa-

tion or thoughts.
b. Interrogative and exclamative sentences. These metarepresent desirable infor-
mation or thoughts. Interrogatives are requests for information if the speaker
metarepresents an answer that the hearer can give, while they are offers of
information if the speaker metarepresents an answer that she can give to the
hearer.
c. Imperative sentences. If the speaker metarepresents a state of affairs as de-
sirable from her own viewpoint, they work as requests; if she metarepre-
sents a state of affairs as desirable from the hearer’s viewpoint, they work as
suggestions.
When metarepresenting another individual’s thoughts or words, the speaker may

also express an attitude to them, so the utterance becomes echoic. The attitudes
that the speaker may express are numerous, as she may “[…] indicate that she
agrees or disagrees with the original, is puzzled, angry, amused, intrigued, scep-
tical, etc.; or any combination of these” (Wilson 1999: 147). However, three atti-
tudes seem to be essential for understanding some types of utterances: endorsing,
questioning and dissociative/rejecting. This last one is characteristic of irony, which
Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) analyse as a case of echoic attributive metarep-
resentation. An utterance is interpreted as ironic if the hearer identifies (i) that the
speaker echoes her own or somebody else’s thoughts or words, (ii) the source of
those thoughts or words and (iii) that the speaker dissociates from or rejects those
thoughts or words. This analysis of irony contrasts with both the classical and
Gricean definitions, as well as with other more recent treatments in pragmatics
and psychology.
Understanding utterances, then, involves much more than identifying words
or arranging these in constituents. Hearers have to adjust concepts, assign ref-
erence, recover material that is not overtly present and, very importantly, deter-
mine the attitude the speaker projects towards what she says or whether what the
speaker says is her own thoughts or somebody else’s thoughts. As pointed out, all
these tasks rely on inference, so Sperber and Wilson depict comprehension as a
process in which the constant search for relevance causes the human make vari-
ous inferences at the same time and at an incredibly fast pace.
1.6 A new picture of comprehension
Decoding only yields a set of conceptual representations or logical form, which is

not fully propositional and needs enriching through inference. Inferential enrich-
ment amounts to performing (some of) the tasks listed above and results in the
explicature of an utterance. This is the explicit content communicated by an ut-
terance. This content can be related to any information that the hearer thinks that
the speaker intends or expects him to access – i.e., implicated premises – in order
to arrive at some implicated content – i.e., implicated conclusions. Both implicated
premises and conclusions amount to the utterance implicit content and are often
alluded to by the umbrella term ‘implicatures’. These are strong if the hearer has
enough evidence to think that the speaker expects him to access or draw them,
and weak if the hearer lacks enough evidence, so they may be contents that the
speaker derives at his own responsibility (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 199–200).
The comprehension or pragmatic module does not perform all these infer-
ential tasks sequentially, but holistically.3 It processes linguistic input and gener-
ates interpretative hypotheses by simultaneously decoding, considering possible
3. Like other modules, it has a very specific domain of action, is mandatory and works in a fast
and frugal manner (Fodor 1983).
disambiguations, conceptual adjustments and reference-assignments; looking for

elided constituents, constructing possible speech-act or propositional-attitude
descriptions, searching for implicated premises and anticipating possible impli-
cated conclusions. As a result, utterance comprehension can be described as a
process of mutual adjustment of both explicit and implicit content (Carston 2002;
Wilson and Sperber 2002, 2004). Whether its outcomes is one or another depends
on considerations about which option might result in a satisfactory number of
cognitive effects in exchange of a reasonable amount of cognitive effort. This
means that the pragmatic module does not search for the most relevant outcome,
which would involve constructing all the possible interpretative hypotheses and
assessing them.
From this picture of comprehension follows the relevance-theoretic com-
prehension heuristics, which captures how the mind works in comprehension.
Accordingly, hearers follow the path of least effort when adjusting explicit and
implicit content of utterances, thus formulating interpretative hypotheses, and
stop when their expectations of relevance are satisfied (Wilson 1999: 136; Wilson
and Sperber 2002, 2004: 612). It is reasonable for hearers to do so because they
will normally expect speakers, depending on their abilities and preferences,
to formulate utterances in an easy and straightforward manner (Wilson and
Sperber 2002: 259). Since relevance decreases as cognitive effort increases, hearers
will very likely regard a particular interpretative hypothesis as intended if they
can easily construct it. Moreover, it is reasonable for hearers to stop when an
interpretative hypothesis satisfies their expectations of relevance because there
should only be one optimally relevant interpretation. Two (or more) optimal-
ly relevant interpretations would detract from optimal relevance, as hearers will
have to invest the additional effort to assess them.4
1.7 A new conception of the role of the speaker
The very nature of inference does not guarantee that the outcome of mutual
adjustment is the expected or intended one. The audience may misunderstand
the speaker if they fail at any of the tasks involved (Yus Ramos 1999a, 1999b).
However, communicators may guide the audience to the intended interpretations
by means of their linguistic or expressive choices, thus ensuring that the audi-
ence understand them correctly. Style is therefore seen by Sperber and Wilson
(1995: 219) as consequence of the communicator’s willingness to be optimally
relevant and assist the audience in comprehension. Speakers may take advantage
4. See Allot (2002) for a discussion on rationality and the relevance-theoretic comprehension
procedure.
of linguistic repertoires in order to generate specific cognitive effects that hearers

could not obtain otherwise.
Formulations of a specific message that turn out indirect, lengthy, repetitive,
and probably costlier in terms of processing effort, may evidence the speaker’s de-
sire to communicate (a wide array of) weak implicatures that contribute to opti-
mal relevance. Among those implicatures, hearers may deduce information about
how the speaker feels about a particular state of affairs, the reasons why the speak-
er phrases her message in a particular manner, how she treats the audience, their
social relationship, etc. Weak implicatures like those would be of a behavioural
nature (Jary 2013) and their derivation is essential for understanding phenomena
like (im)politeness or literary communication (Pilkington 2000).
1.8 The conceptual-procedural distinction
Communication may now be metaphorically described as a ball where the speak-

er initially takes the lead in her conversational turn and then passes it to the
hearer, who will take it in his turn and pass it back to the speaker again. As this
exchange of turns takes place, meaning progressively emerges and is confirmed
or negotiated. Although speakers and hearers collaborate in the joint endeavor of
co-constructing meaning, the former can also assist the latter in their interpreta-
tive tasks.
Speakers can direct hearers’ attention to specific sets of assumptions, or bring
to the fore those they expect hearers to exploit, by means of the conceptual items
in utterances. Thus, speakers help hearers select the mental context wherein to
interpret what is said and, if necessary, figure out the premises necessary to arrive
at implicit contents. On the other hand, speakers can also indicate how hearers
should assign reference to some expressions, relate diverse items of information
or construct adequate descriptions capturing their attitude to the proposition
expressed, their degree of (un)certainty about it or what they intend to achieve
with their words. This is possible because a variety of linguistic elements encode
procedural meaning: instructions that the comprehension module follows when
computing information, which somehow impose constraints on inferences.
The distinction between conceptual and procedural expressions has been an-
other major contribution of relevance theory and has led a number of scholars to
analyse a series of expressions accordingly (Wilson 2016; Carston 2016). Nouns,
verbs and adjectives encode conceptual content, even if that content is amenable
to subsequent adjustment resulting in what is known as ad hoc concepts: one-off,
occasion-specific concepts (Wilson and Carston 2007; Carston 2012). In contrast,
discourse markers encode procedures that indicate the relationships between
specific propositions and, therefore, steer the comprehension module toward one
direction or another. The notion of procedural meaning enables practitioners in
relevance-theoretic pragmatics to overcome drawbacks of the Gricean distinction
between conversational and conventional implicatures, the latter of which were
thought to result from the linguistically encoded material.
Some procedural elements like proper names and personal pronouns encode
some conceptual content, even if schematic (Wilson and Sperber 1993).5 That
conceptual content is integrated in the lower-level explicatures of an utterance
together with the concepts encoded by other words. In contrast, the conceptual
content of other expressions like attitudinal adverbials (e.g., ‘happily’, ‘unfortu-
nately’), illocutionary adverbials (e.g., ‘frankly’, ‘seriously’), evidential adverbials
(e.g., ‘obviously’, ‘evidently’), hearsay adverbials (e.g., ‘allegedly’, ‘reportedly’), and
some parenthetical expressions (e.g., ‘they say’, ‘I hear’) becomes part of high-
er-level explicatures. While attitudinal and illocutionary adverbials indicate to
hearers the sort of attitudinal description under which they must embed the
proposition expressed, evidential and hearsay adverbials and parenthetical ele-
ments indicate whether the speaker has or lacks adequate evidence about the in-
formation dispensed (Wilson and Sperber 1993; Wilson 1999).
2. Research within relevance-theoretic pragmatics
In a paper published on the occasion of the first decade of relevance theory – the
title of this chapter is clearly inspired by it – Yus Ramos (1998) extensively re-
viewed the contributions made by relevance theorists thus far. The publication of
the theory was followed by some special issues in journals (e.g. Smith and Wilson
1992; Wilson and Smith 1993; Mateo Martínez and Yus Ramos 1998). An edited
collection presented diverse applications and implications to understand irony,
metaphor, metonymy, hearsay particles, some adverbials or scalar implicatures
(Carston and Uchida 1998), while another presented in-depth analyses of the
conceptual-procedural distinction, intonation, focus phenomena, semantically
underdetermined linguistic forms or the role of pragmatic inference (Rouchota
and Jucker 1998). The theory was also applied to literary communication (e.g.,
Pilkington 1991, 1992), media discourse (e.g., Yus Ramos 1995, 1997, 1998),
translation (e.g., Gutt 1989, 1991) or humour (e.g., Jodłowiec 1991; Curcó 1995,
1996, 1997; Yus Ramos 1997, 1998). And a notable bulk of research centred on
grammar and discourse, addressing issues such as:
5. Note, however, that some authors consider pronouns to be purely procedural items (e.g.,
Scott 2016).
– discourse markers (e.g., Blakemore 1987, 1988, 1989; Jucker 1993; Moeschler
1993; Rouchota 1995);
– different types of adverbials and particles (e.g., Blass 1989, 1990; Ifantidou
1992, 1993; Itani 1994; Imai 1998);
– mood (e.g., Wilson and Sperber 1988, 1993; Clark 1993; Rouchota 1994) and
modality (e.g., Berbeira Gardón 1993, 1998; Groefsema 1995);
– tense and aspect (e.g., Moeschler 1993; Wilson and Sperber 1993), or
– reformulations (Blakemore 1992, 1993, 1994).
Research from a relevance-theoretic perspective has continued with renewed

enthusiasm and a vivid impetus. The prominence given to the role of inference
in the determination of the explicit content of utterances led Carston (2002) to
collect and profoundly revise a series of her most illuminating works on the prag-
matics of explicit communication. Her ideas were also celebrated years later with
the publication of another volume that showed their explanatory potential (Soria
and Romero 2010). Quite similarly, the evolution of the theory subsequently en-
couraged other scholars to revisit issues like literary communication (Pilkington
2000; Unger 2006), evidentiality (Ifantidou 2001), particles (Iten 2002), humour
(Yus Ramos 2003, 2008, 2013, 2016; Solska 2012), discourse markers (Blakemore
2002; Hall 2007; Moeschler 2016), figurative speech (Vega Moreno 2007), intona-
tion or paralanguage (Wilson and Wharton 2006; Wharton 2009). The resulting
adjustments of the theory have also been presented in a series of works by Wilson
and Sperber (2002, 2004, 2012).
Later innovations, applications and suggestions for further research have also
been included in some manuals, which make the theory accessible to students
and novel researchers (e.g., Blakemore 1992; Yus Ramos 1997; Clark 2013). For
the sake of exemplification, suffice it to mention those in areas like:
– misunderstanding (e.g., Yus Ramos 1999a, 1999b; Jodłowiec 2008) and prag-
matic failure (e.g., Padilla Cruz 2013a, 2014);
– phatic communion (e.g., Žegarac 1998; Žegarac and Clark 1999a, 1999b;
Padilla Cruz 2005a, 2007a, 2007b);
– (im)politeness (e.g., Escandell Vidal 1996, 1998; Jary 1998a, 1998b, 2013);
– historical linguistics (e.g., Ruiz Moneva 1997; Padilla Cruz 2003, 2005b; Clark
2016);
– language acquisition, pragmatic competence and interlanguage pragmatic
development (e.g., Padilla Cruz 2013b; Ifantidou 2014);
– computer-mediated communication (e.g., Yus Ramos 2001, 2010, 2011);
– expressive meaning (e.g., Moeschler 2009; Blakemore 2011; Piskorska 2012a;
Wharton 2016);
– communication disorders and clinical pragmatics (e.g., Papp 2006; Leinonen

and Ryder 2008; Wearing 2010), or
– the relationship between epistemic vigilance and understanding (e.g.,
Mascaro and Sperber 2009; Sperber et al. 2010; Padilla Cruz 2012; Mazzarella
2013, 2015).
The latest directions relevance theory has taken can also be seen in other more
recent edited collections and special journal issues. These gather works which
delve into the conceptual-procedural distinction, the nature and role of ad hoc
concepts, lexical pragmatics, the role of context and metarepresentation, the
role of valence, phatic communion, focal stress, the interactions of modality and
evidentiality with epistemic vigilance, humour, (im)politeness, miscommuni-
cation, interjections and response cries, various speech acts, emotions, implic-
it communication, translation or style (Mioduszewska 2004; Korzeniowska and
Grzegorzewska 2005; Wałaszewska, Kisielewska-Krysiuk and Piskorska 2010;
Escandell Vidal, Leonetti and Ahern 2011; Piskorska 2012b; Wałaszewska and
Piskorska 2012; Wałaszewska 2015; Sasamoto and Wilson 2016). Finally, one
more volume will soon present new applications to computer-mediated dis-
course, psychotherapeutic discourse, literary discourse, humorous discourse, lex-
ical pragmatics or morphology (Wałaszewska and Piskorska, in press).
The list of topics and references given here is obviously far from exhaustive,
but it seeks to give an idea of the impressive amount of work done or in pro-
gress, to which the chapters gathered in this book purport to add up. Readers
will certainly gain access to more specific references in databases, bibliographic
repositories or catalogues, as well as on the “Relevance Theory Online Biblio-
graphic Service.” Created some years ago and monthly updated by Yus Ramos
(http://personal.ua.es/francisco.yus/rt2.html), this service facilitates access to an
immense number of works through an index of authors in alphabetical order or
a list of thematic sections.
3. This book
This collection is divided in four parts on the basis of common thematic threads:
procedural meaning, discourse issues, interpretive processes, and the rhetorical
and perlocutionary effects of communication. Although, as shown in the preced-
ing section, the range of interests of relevance theorists is quite wide, the parts in
which this volume is divided address topics that have traditionally intrigued them
and areas where significant contributions and progresses are being made. More-
over, although the chapters in each part delve into specific issues or phenomena,
they have different orientations and implications for fields as diverse as linguistic
description, morphology, machine translation, rhetoric and argumentation, or
interlanguage pragmatic development.
3.1 Issues on procedural meaning and procedural analyses
The first part groups four papers that rely on the notion of procedural meaning.
The first two papers look into the interaction of procedural elements with in-
tonation, thus broadening the scope of procedural analyses, while the third pa-
per presents what can be considered a traditional relevance-theoretic procedural
analysis of some linguistic elements in an African language, thus contributing to
its description. The last paper explores the procedural meaning of verbal tenses
and shows the usefulness and applicability of procedural analyses for a field like
machine translation.
The first chapter is “The speaker’s derivational intention”, by Thorstein
Fretheim. Based on the notion of derivational intention, which alludes to the route
the audience should follow in order to reach the content of the speaker’s inform-
ative intention, this chapter shows the usefulness of that notion and argues that it
cannot be separated from that of informative intention. Fretheim claims that the
speaker’s derivational intention is constrained by encoded conceptual semantics
and encoded procedural semantics alike. However, a given piece of procedural
information may be at odds with the speaker’s derivational intention in a giv-
en context, and hence with her informative intention. Accordingly, he contends
that the procedural meaning encoded by one expression may override and set
aside the procedural meaning encoded by a co-occurring expression, if there is
an intuitively felt conflict between the constraints on interpretation that the two
expressions encode. In such cases, the more powerful procedural constraint is
consonant with the speaker’s derivational intention and the less powerful proce-
dural constraint is not.
By means of two sections on the pragmatic functions of certain intonational
phenomena in Norwegian, Fretheim illustrates how native speakers differently
ranked co-occurring procedural constraints on pragmatic interpretation. This
caused their audience to adhere to the procedural information conveyed by the
expression with the higher rank and to disregard the information coming from
the more modestly ranked encoder of procedural meaning. The first section re-
ports on results from a listening comprehension experiment. It showed that the
more highly ranked procedural constraint prevailed. The second section discuss-
es the extent to which Optimality Theory may be a suitable framework for han-
dling conflicts between co-occurring procedural constraints.
The second chapter is “Cracking the chestnut: How intonation interacts with
procedural meaning in Colloquial Singapore English lah”, by Junwen Lee and
Chonghyuck Kim. Also assuming that procedural meaning may interact with in-
tonation, it looks into the different pragmatic functions of this particle, which are
argued to result from the interaction between its unitary semantic meaning and
the effect of pitch. This chapter questions previous analyses of this particle as a
marker of solidarity, warmth or informality, attenuation or emphasis, assertion or
accommodation. Due to the variety of pitch contours with which this particle can
be pronounced, it had generally been regarded as either a set of homonymic vari-
ants, or as a unitary particle with a monolithic meaning despite tonal differences.
For Lee and Kim, ‘lah’ describes the preceding proposition as being of high
strength. The falling tone characteristic of declaratives leads the hearer to in-
terpret that proposition as referring to an actual situation, while the rising tone
characteristic of interrogatives leads him to interpret it as alluding to a desirable
thought. The various pragmatic functions ascribable to ‘lah’ then arise as a conse-
quence of processing. Additionally, this chapter accounts for a particularly trou-
blesome phenomenon: the ability of ‘lah’ to pragmatically strengthen declaratives
but to weaken imperatives. Through the chapter, its authors show that relevance
theory provides a useful framework for analysing the effect of intonation on the
processing of this discourse particle, which opens up new ways of characterising
other particles in Singapore English.
In “Reference assignment in pronominal argument languages: A relevance-
theoretic perspective”, Helga Schröder adheres to the relevance-theoretic view
that reference assignment is part of the process of explicature construction and
that pronominal expressions procedurally constrain it (Wilson and Sperber 1993;
Sperber and Wilson 1995). By instructing hearers to pick out a reference, pro-
nominals contribute to the computational side of comprehension. Based on data
from Toposa, an Eastern Nilotic language spoken in South Sudan, and Kiswahili,
spoken in Kenya, Shröeder demonstrates that two procedures are involved in ref-
erence assignment in African pronominal argument languages: an incorporated
pronoun in the verb helps identify the referent, while that pronoun in the verb
helps an attributive expression achieve referential status.
Quite often, African languages do not mark their nominal expressions for defi-
niteness or indefiniteness, so they enter the conversation as undetermined. Dis-
ambiguation of such expressions requires pragmatic enrichment. Those languages
seem to follow a ‘double strategy’ in terms of reference assignment. Pronominals
can be marked in the verb or occur independently. Independent pronouns do
not encode procedural information guiding the selection of the correct referent,
whereas incorporated pronouns do. Processing independent pronouns, Schröeder
concludes, requires extra effort but yields cognitive effects related to focus identi-
fication and contrastive focus.
The last paper in this part has an empirical orientation and combines cor-
pus work and linguistic experiments. In “Conceptual and procedural information
for verb tense disambiguation: The English simple past”, Cristina Grisot, Bruno
Cartoni and Jacques Moeschler seek to elucidate which features should be includ-
ed in a model explaining and predicting cross-linguistic variation in the transla-
tion of tenses. Thus, the authors also try to explain how a source language verb
tenses may be disambiguated in order to choose from among different translation
possibilities and which features could contribute to improving the output of Sta-
tistical Machine Translation systems.
Corpus analysis reveals a lack of correspondence between English and French
tenses. One of the most frequent divergences is that of the English simple past.
Its semantic and pragmatic domains may be rendered in French through three
tenses: passé composé, passé simple and imparfait. The authors assume that the
conceptual and procedural contents of the English simple past can be used as
disambiguation criteria in order to search for a French equivalent. They test this
hypothesis through annotation experiments, whose results partially confirm their
hypothesis.
3.2 Discourse issues
The two chapters in the second part of this book are connected by the fact that
they address discourse. While the first chapter deals with the clues that hearers
can rely on in order to perceive discourse as ironical, the second one analyses how
specific manifestations of discourse, namely, rhetorical and ironical questions,
may be distinguished. Obviously, these two chapters are further connected by the
fact that they address irony from a relevance-theoretic perspective.
Francisco Yus Ramos had previously argued that irony comprehension in-
volves the simultaneous or sequential activation of one or several contextu-
al sources. A successful activation of these sources, especially the saturation of
information that they may give rise to, leads to the so-called “criterion of op-
timal accessibility to irony.” Also, the simultaneous or sequential activation of
these sources generates a number of prototypical cases in the comprehension of
irony. This view of irony, the author thinks, is fully compatible with the extant
relevance-theoretic approach based on the idea that irony is a case of echoic me-
tarepresentational use of language, in which the speaker expresses a dissociative
attitude towards certain words or thoughts attributable to some other (group of)
individual(s).
In “Relevance theory and contextual sources-centred analysis of irony: Cur-

rent research and compatibility”, Francisco Yus Ramos has two aims. On the one
hand, he checks whether those prototypical cases of irony are still valid and do
cover all the possible ironic situations, together with the introduction of a more
fine-grained notion of narrowed cognitive environment. On the other hand, he
assesses to what extent his approach fits the latest relevance-theoretic research
on irony such as the one involving different types of metarepresentation that are
activated in successful irony comprehension.
Next, “Distinguishing rhetorical from ironical questions: A relevance-
theoretic account”, by Thierry Raeber, aims to offer criteria for differentiating
rhetorical from ironical questions. Some of their features have been conflated on
the grounds of the interpretative effects ironical questions seem to yield. Indeed,
ironical questions have often been regarded as subtypes of rhetorical questions
(Bonhomme 2005), or vice versa, rhetorical questions have been considered as
subtypes of ironical questions (Gibbs 2000) owing to the obvious answer they call
for, their persuasive power and the cognitive effects they result in.
However, Raeber suggests that rhetorical and ironical questions are to be
distinguished because the former implicitly assert a proposition bearing rele-
vance – in most cases the answer itself or its consequences – while such implicit
proposition, though manifest to the hearer, is not relevant at all by itself in ironi-
cal questions. The proposition rhetorical questions implicitly assert is recoverable
thanks to a biased choice of answer. In contrast, ironical questions exhibit their
in-context inaccuracy, thus giving rise to specific effects resulting from the con-
textual absurdity of pragmatic expectations, which are to be mobilized in order
to motivate the question. Accordingly, Raeber proposes that failure at satisfying
the hearer’s expectations of relevance triggers the attitudinal, non-propositional
effects associated with ironical questions.
3.3 Interpretive processes
The third part of the book also includes two chapters, but these are connected
by the fact that they consider interpretation. While the first one centres on the
interpretive processes by learners of a second language, the second one analyses
how different linguistic elements are put to work in order to guide interpreta-
tion. The first chapter shows that relevance theory has significant implications
for, and very helpful applications to, the field of interlanguage pragmatics. The
second chapter, in turn, offers interesting insights into evidentials. Furthermore,
both chapters are connected by the fact that, although in different domains, they
take into account the role of epistemic vigilance mechanisms. These mechanisms
have recently started to attract the interest of relevance theorists and are currently
receiving due attention from them, as these works show.
Assuming that little attention has been paid to the cognitive underpinnings
of L2 learners’ pragmatic competence, Elly Ifantidou addresses the role of vigi-
lance mechanisms in interlanguage pragmatic development in “Relevance theory,
epistemic vigilance and pragmatic competence.” The author evaluates the effect of
explicit pragmatic instruction in an EFL academic context and of language pro-
ficiency on learners’ metapragmatic awareness. This is an empirical study which
considers different conditions of treatment, as determined by type of pragmatic
input and level of language proficiency. It compares data from three groups of
undergraduate students of English Language and Literature, which are used as
control and experimental groups.
Through newspaper editorials, Ifantidou examines how learners may exer-
cise epistemic vigilance towards the source of information and thus avoid be-
ing accidentally or intentionally misinformed. In the metapragmatic awareness
task she administered, learners relied on (i) relevance-theoretic mechanisms for
comprehension of content and search for relevance, and (ii) epistemic vigilance
for acceptance of both the content and source of communicated information.
Since understanding is a precondition, even though not sufficient, for believing
(Sperber et al. 2010: 368; Wilson 2010), learners’ pragmatic competence may ben-
efit from sophisticated mindreading if they exercise epistemic vigilance towards
the informant’s (i.e., newspaper journalist’s) epistemic states (e.g., acceptance,
doubt, rejection) and intentions (e.g., to inform, to mislead). Therefore, the devel-
opment of L2 learners’ pragmatic competence is contingent on the development
of their epistemic vigilance mechanisms.
The second paper analyses the interaction of epistemic vigilance with genre
and evidentials – i.e., grammatical elements indicating the type of evidence the
speaker has for making a statement. Authored by Christoph Unger, “Evidentials,
genre and epistemic vigilance” shows that existing accounts have mainly explored
the contribution of these elements to comprehension of speaker’s meaning. How-
ever, communicators may exploit evidentials in order to indicate that they are
competent in distinguishing their information sources (Wilson 2011). Hence,
evidentials help communicators portray themselves as trustworthy individuals
and enable the audience to evaluate the evidential status of the communicated
information.
Drawing from Wilson (2011), Unger argues that evidentials may be used as
genre indicators. Indeed, Aikhenvald (2004) had shown that reported evidentials
very often appear in traditional narratives. This suggests that reported evidentials
and traditional narrative genres may be conventionally related. Accordingly, the
author contends that, as opposed to general markers of metarepresentational use
and other indicators of information source, true reported evidentials raise the ac-
tivation of a whole array of cognitive mechanisms specialised in checking support
and coherence of the communicated content with existing beliefs. Furthermore,
the relevance of traditional narratives resides in the validity of cultural values or
norms communicated through exemplification. For this reason, the processing of
such narratives strongly engages the argumentation module, whose activation is
raised by reported evidentials.
3.4 Rhetorical and perlocutionary effects of communication
Before closing this book with additional directions for future research, the two
chapters included in its fourth part analyse different effects of communication
from a relevance-theoretic angle. The first chapter considers how arguments may
succeed in rhetorical terms, thus introducing the machinery of relevance theory
to the field of argumentation. In contrast, the second chapter looks into perlo-
cutionary effects, an area that is increasingly drawing the attention of relevance
theorists and where significant developments have been made. Moreover, both
chapters also take into account the role of epistemic vigilance mechanisms, which
links them to the contents of the previous part.
“Rhetoric and cognition: Pragmatic constraints on argument processing”
adopts a cognitive-pragmatic perspective on rhetorical effectiveness in order to
hypothesise that the information-selection mechanisms in interpretation posi-
tively influence the outcome of subsequent argumentative evaluation. Moreover,
author Steve Oswald moves for the inclusion of a cognitive-pragmatic component
in a theory of argumentation, which has typically refrained from adopting cog-
nitive standpoints (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004: 74). Indeed, individuals
need to understand arguments before evaluating them, which makes comprehen-
sion, to some extent at least, responsible for the selection of premises that will
constitute the input to the evaluative stage of argumentation. Accordingly, ar-
guers who want to convince their audience can be said to seek to constrain their
interpretative processes so that they only presumably select ‘rhetorically-friendly’
contextual premises.
Rhetorical effectiveness is defined as the propensity for an argument to ensure
that its conclusion appears to be optimally relevant with respect to its premises.
In other words, successful arguments are those whose conclusions (i) are derived
with little effort and (ii) generate significant cognitive effects given a series of
premises. This definition encompasses both cases of sound argumentation, where
potential counter-arguments are weighed and dismissed as epistemically weaker
than the argument under consideration, and cases of fallacious argumentation,
whose success rests on the audience’s inability to mobilise counter-evidence and

discard the argument as fallacious (Maillat and Oswald 2009, 2011; Oswald 2010,
2011). Fallacious moves are therefore seen as attempts to manipulate those two
conditions by making ‘rhetorically-friendly’ assumptions epistemically strong
and accessible, and ‘rhetorically-unfriendly’ assumptions weak and less accessible.
Perlocutionary effects should not be merely understood as consequences
of the comprehension process, but as phenomena influencing the way commu-
nicated stimuli are actually processed. In “Perlocutionary effects and relevance
theory”, Agnieszka Piskorska narrows down the traditional Austinian definition
of perlocution and confines it to intentionally evoked mental states, which may
have a cognitive or affective nature. Although the notion of ‘perlocution’ was in-
itially alien to relevance theory, there has recently been a growing interest in the
speech-act theoretic concept (e.g., Jary 2010; see also Witczak-Plisiecka 2013 for
a review). Sharing this interest, Piskorska briefly overviews relevance-theoretic
insights into speech acts, such as its reductionism of speech act types or its ac-
count of illocutionary force in terms of procedural meaning. Then, she presents
arguments supporting her claim.
The main one is that on many occasions effects like amusement, warning/
threatening or offending are the reasons why individuals interact. If relevance
is assessed solely in terms of positive cognitive effects, something important is
missing. Indeed, extant relevance-theoretic analyses of politeness phenomena
(Escandell Vidal 1998, 2004) and metaphor (Pilkington 2010) question the view
that meaning equals the sum of explicatures and implicatures. Emotion and cog-
nition must be integrated in pragmatic analyses of meaning and its consequenc-
es, as argued in (neuro)psychology (e.g., Damasio 1994). Therefore, Piskorska
makes two suggestions about the relationship between comprehension and affec-
tive states, which are consistent with the massive modularity model of the mind
(Sperber 2005). Nevertheless, experiments on the role of perlocutions are needed,
although their results could be limited due to the difficulties at modelling actual
emotions in experimental settings.
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Part I
Issues on procedural meaning

and procedural analyses
The speaker’s derivational intention
Thorstein Fretheim
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Adopting the basic tenets of relevance theory, Powell (2010) introduces the
concept of derivational intention as something separate from a speaker’s in-
formative intention. The derivational intention of a speaker is an intention
concerning the pragmatically inferred route that the hearer should take in order
to recognize the speaker’s informative intention. This paper addresses what
can happen when a speaker’s derivational intention is at odds with a particular
piece of procedural information encoded by some linguistic expression, with
the conceptual semantics of a lexical item, or with the procedural meaning of an
intonation pattern employed by the speaker. The procedural meaning of one ex-
pression may override that of a co-occurring expression when there is a conflict
between them.
Keywords: intonation, procedural meaning/information, informative intention,

derivational intention, focus
1. Introduction
1.1 The concept of “derivational intention”
Powell (2010) observes that, in addition to Sperber and Wilson’s concept of in-
formative intention (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995), “a speaker will have inten-
tions concerning the route via which her audience should reach the content of
her informative intention” (Powell 2010: 29). This he refers to as the speaker’s der-
ivational intention. Powell does not develop his concept of derivational intention
much, but he notes that there may be cases “[…] in which the speaker’s deriva-
tional intention does not, in fact, lead to the content of her informative inten-
tion” (Powell 2010: 30), and then he adds that, “[…] intuitions may be weighted
towards either of the intentions, thus allowing for the possibility of two distinct
intuitions concerning what is said by one and the same utterance […]” (Powell
2010: 30).
doi 10.1075/pbns.268.02fre
© 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company
34 Thorstein Fretheim
My feeling is that the concept of derivational intention may be an important

addition to the relevance theorist’s toolbox, but I fail to see how the derivation-
al intention behind a speaker’s utterance can be in conflict with her informative
intention. (A possible exception might be when a speaker erroneously believes
that her description is satisfied by the intended referent.) For me, the speaker’s
derivational intention is for the hearer to pursue an inferential route that is conso-
nant with those procedural constraints that enable him to work out the speaker’s
informative intention. However, I shall argue that a piece of linguistically encoded
procedural information in the relevance-theoretic sense (Blakemore 1987, 2002;
Wilson and Sperber 1993) may occasionally contradict a speaker’s derivational
intention. A hearer has successfully recognized the speaker’s derivational in-
tention if, and only if, the inferential route pursued leads to recognition of the
informative intention. On the other hand, the hearer may identify the speaker’s
informative intention even if the encoded procedural meaning of one particular
linguistic expression points in a different direction, to an inferential path that fails
to lead to the result intended by the speaker.
It is always a combination of conceptual and procedural information that
constrains the hearer’s pragmatic search for the speaker’s derivational intention
and informative intention. The hearer’s recognition of the speaker’s derivational
intention is based on a fused impression of how conceptual information and pro-
cedural information together constrain the relevance of a given utterance. It is my
objective to show that the encoded procedural meaning of a linguistic expression
is fallible, just as the encoded conceptual meaning of a linguistic expression is
fallible because taking it at face value in the pragmatic phase of utterance inter-
pretation will sometimes lead to a wrong interpretation.
1.2 Mismatch between derivational intention and encoded procedural

information
The following is the opening sentence of the Norwegian novel De Udødelige (‘The
immortal ones’) by the author Ketil Bjørnstad:
(1) Tanken kom først lenge etter at hun hadde sovnet
thought.DEF came first long after that she had slept.INCHO
‘The thought occurred [to NN] only long after she had fallen asleep’
The reader does not know who the feminine pronoun hun (‘she’) refers to, or
who the thought belongs to. Tanken (‘the thought’) has a conceptual meaning
that restricts the denotatum to something identifiable as a thought, and the suf-
fixed definiteness marker n (tanke-n) encodes the procedural information that
the reader should be able to associate the referring expression with a determina-
ble thought, though the reader cannot access any such thought when reading (1).
For pragmatic reasons one would be inclined to infer that the thought does not
belong to the woman represented by the personal pronoun hun. This conclusion
depends partly on the lexical meaning of the inchoative verb sovne (‘fall asleep’)
in (1) and partly on an implicature derived from this opening sentence, an infer-
ential process that requires access to the conceptual meaning of the verb sovne.
Although people who remember thoughts that occurred to them in their dreams
do exist, most of us do not normally form thoughts in our sleep that we are able
to re-activate and remember accurately afterwards. Despite formal linguistic ap-
pearances, the thought in (1) is unlikely to be the thought of the female referent of
the pronoun hun, a thought that occurred to her while she was asleep.
The next sentence, here presented as (2), supports the assumption that the
thought does not belong to the referent of the pronoun hun in (1).
(2) Da hadde han ligget og vridd seg i minst en time
then had he lain and twisted REFL in least one hour
‘Then he had been lying turning from side to side for at least an hour’
The indexical da (‘then’) in (2) must refer to the point in time when the thought
mentioned in (1) was formed. (2) tells the reader that the bedfellow of the wom-
an is a man, and it invites the reader to infer that the referent of the masculine
pronoun han (‘he’) is the one who formed the as yet unidentifiable thought, and
that the thought came to this man a long time after his female companion had
fallen asleep. A personal pronoun like hun (‘she’) or han (‘he’) encodes two pieces
of procedural information: (i) the reader should seek out a candidate referent
of the female or male gender, respectively (some would say that “female” is the
conceptual meaning encoded by hun, and that “male” is the conceptual meaning
encoded by han), and (ii) this referent is already in the hearer’s focus of attention.
The next paragraph of the opening page of the novel reveals that the man and the
woman lying side by side in bed are a married couple. In the course of the next
three pages, the reader receives a substantial amount of background information
about this couple, as well as information that shows how the first word tanken
(‘the thought’) in (1) should be linked to a possessive modifier so that a unique
proposition for sentence (1) can be derived through backtracking.
Pronouns in opening sentences of novels and short stories would appear to be
problematic for the Givenness Hierarchy (GH) theory about the cognitive status
of discourse referents proposed by Jeanette Gundel and her collaborators (in par-
ticular, Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski 1993). This theory postulates six univer-
sal, implicationally related cognitive statuses of referents associated with different
types of nominal referring expressions. These statuses are, from the highest (most
constraining) to the lowest (least constraining): In Focus, Activated, Familiar,

Uniquely Identifiable, Referential and Type Identifiable. A given cognitive status
is entailed by any cognitive status that is higher in the hierarchy, so that whenever
a referent is in focus of attention for speaker and hearer, giving it the highest pos-
sible cognitive status In Focus, it is by necessity also Activated, Familiar, Uniquely
Identifiable, and so on. In certain papers written in the wake of the cutting-edge
article from 1993, Gundel calls the encoded information about the relationship
between a referring expression and its intended referent’s cognitive status “pro-
cedural information.” She writes: “GH statuses are mental states (not linguistic
entities); the linguistic forms that encode these statuses provide procedural in-
formation, in the sense of relevance theory […] about how to access (a mental
representation of) the referent […]” (Gundel 2011: 207). It is true of all tokens
of unaccented anaphoric pronouns in discourse and many tokens of accented
ones that access to a mental representation of the intended referent depends on
information that is “in focus of attention” for speaker and hearer at the time of
utterance (Gundel 2011: 208), while resolution of the reference of a definite de-
scriptive noun phrase depends on a combination of the conceptual semantics that
the phrase itself encodes plus easily accessible contextual information.
In (1)–(2) there exists no referent which is In Focus, nor one that is Activated,
so that it would license use of a personal pronoun. The personal pronouns in (1)
and (2) and the description tanken (‘the thought’) in (1) fail to satisfy the pro-
cedural constraints encoded by a pronoun or a definiteness marker. The reader
has to read on in order to get a chance to resolve the reference of these referring
expressions. There is no antecedent phrase that helps to determine the referent of
the two pronouns hun (‘she’) and han (‘he’), so they are not anaphoric. This is also
no example of cataphora in the traditional syntactic or discourse-structural sense,
because descriptive information that will cause the reader to link the personal
pronouns to unique individuals within the author’s fictional universe is presented
in scattered places several paragraphs later.
It would be wrong to conclude that the GH approach to the procedural se-
mantics of pronouns, demonstratives and definiteness markers is in need of re-
vision simply because the pronouns in (1)–(2) and the definite description in (1)
do not offer the reader sufficient information to identify the entities that these
expressions refer to. I would like to propose that, for pragmatic reasons, a reader
of the sequence of (1)–(2) will understand that the derivational intention of the
author is at odds with the procedural semantics of the pronouns and the marker
of definiteness, and that there is an asymmetry between the author’s own knowl-
edge of what the referring expressions represent and the knowledge that he has
decided to share with the reader in the novel’s opening paragraph. The author’s
derivational intention in (1) and (2) includes the assumption that readers suspend
their expectation that the pronouns refer to a female gender entity and a male
gender entity of which they are able to form a unique mental representation at the
point in the text where they occur. Similarly, the author’s derivational intention
includes the assumption that readers should suspend their expectation that the
definite description tanken (‘the thought’) in (1) refers to a uniquely identifiable
thought. However, the pronouns and the definiteness marker encode the same
procedural information here as elsewhere. There is a conflict between the proce-
dural information that the personal pronoun and the definite description in (1)
offer the reader and the author’s derivational intention that readers defer their
reference resolution task until a bit later in the reading process. By using referring
expressions in the opening lines of the novel that encode a higher cognitive status
for their referents than what the reader’s knowledge permits, the author has uti-
lized a well-known literary technique which helps to resolve the apparent conflict
between the author’s choice of referring expressions and the author’s derivational
intention.
We can account for and justify the referring expressions in (1)–(2) by in-
voking a specific pragmatic dictum familiar from relevance theory (Sperber and
Wilson 1986/1995), namely that the linguistic semantics of a verbal stimulus
underdetermines the speaker’s informative intention, hence, I would add, the
speaker’s derivational intention. The linguistic semantics encoded by a sentence
includes strictly procedural information as well as concepts contributing to the
proposition expressed. It is an accepted truth within relevance theory that encod-
ed conceptual meaning should be processed with caution in the pragmatic phase
of utterance comprehension and that it is frequently in need of context-sensitive
adjustment (e.g. Wilson and Carston 2007; Carston 2012), but encoded proce-
dural information should be treated with caution as well. Successful processing of
the referring expressions in (1)–(2) demands the reader’s awareness that reference
resolution will be possible only later, when the author has given the reader more
contextual information about the main characters in the novel.
An anonymous reviewer remarked that data of the type presented in (1)–(2)
is not typical of everyday communication. I agree. One could even argue that
the missing antecedents of the tokens of the personal pronouns hun and han in
(1)–(2) justify the judgment that a rule of grammar is violated. Due to an im-
poverished linguistic input, the explicature of (1) cannot be determined until we
read on and access supplementary information. Readers of the opening sentence
(1) who possess basic knowledge of certain genre conventions are not likely to
be frustrated because (1) fails to supply information sufficient to determine the
author’s informative intention. They will typically suspend their expectation of
a relevant linguistic input, because they acknowledge that here the procedural
meanings encoded by a personal pronoun and by a definite description are of no
help in the pragmatic processes of reference resolution. They will therefore infer
that the author intends them to be patient and watch out for pertinent informa-
tion in forthcoming sentences, information that enables them to fill any truth-
conditional gaps that have so far hampered comprehension of the opening lines
of the novel.
1.3 Mismatch between derivational intention and encoded conceptual

information
A piece of encoded conceptual information may fail to direct the hearer to the
speaker’s derivational intention. In such cases it is likely to be ignored, because
what it instructs the hearer to do in the pragmatic processing phase is felt to be
counterproductive, leading to an output that would make the utterance irrelevant.
One very good example of this is the following English text appearing at the back
of all passenger seats in aircraft cabins all over the world:
(3) FASTEN SEAT BELT WHILE SEATED
No rational mind can possibly misunderstand this advice to the passengers. They
are encouraged not to unclasp their seat belts while they are seated, but this is not
what the lexically inchoative verb fasten appears to instruct the passengers to do.
A literal reading of (3) is irrelevant no matter whether it is while seated or fasten
seat belt that is identified as the focus of information. A linguistic form that cap-
tures the communicator’s informative intention through a relevant indication of
the communicator’s derivational intention is seen in the alternative instruction in
(4), which I have never observed on board any aircraft:
(4) KEEP SEAT BELT FASTENED WHILE SEATED
Above all seat rows there are seat belt icons that light up whenever passengers
should fasten their seat belt. This is a sign to keep it fastened as long as the icon
remains lit. The temporal adjunct while seated in (3) shows that the written im-
perative Fasten seat belt while seated has a different function than the seat belt
icon. The adjunct reveals that the derivational intention is for a passenger to in-
terpret (3) as if the text had been (4). While the conceptual semantics of the verb
fasten in (3) encodes a change-of-state from not fastened to fastened, all available
contextual information causes passengers to realize that this aspect of the lexical
meaning of fasten should not be entered into their mental representation of the
written instruction in (3).
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Title: Hand-book of punctuation

with instructions for capitalization, letter-writing, and
proof-reading
Author: William Johnson Cocker
Release date: December 22, 2023 [eBook #72479]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: A. S. Barnes & Co, 1878
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HAND-BOOK

OF PUNCTUATION ***
HAND-BOOK
OF
PUNCTUATION,
WITH INSTRUCTIONS FOR
CAPITALIZATION, LETTER-WRITING,
AND
PROOF-READING,
BY
W. J. COCKER, A. M.
A. S. Barnes & Co.,

New York, Chicago, and New Orleans.
1878.
Copyright, 1878, by W. J. Cocker.

PREFACE.
As the pronunciation of words is determined by the usage of the
best speakers, so, in a great measure, the punctuation of sentences
is based on the usage of the best writers. Recognizing this fact, the
author has aimed,—
1. To state such general rules as are recognized by most writers of
good English.
2. To illustrate these rules by examples taken from many of our
best English classics.
3. To give some of the differences in usage that exist even among
the best of writers.
It is frequently asserted that even good writers differ so much in
their use of punctuation marks that it is impossible to lay down any
general rules, and that it is better for each one to consult his own
taste and judgment. With equal reason it might be said that
inasmuch as good speakers, and even lexicographers, differ in the
pronunciation of words, therefore each speaker should make his own
taste and judgment the standard for correct pronunciation. A writer’s
mode of expressing his thoughts will determine the character and
number of the punctuation marks that he uses, and it is chiefly owing
to this that even good writers differ somewhat in punctuating what
they have written. There are some rules that are invariable under all
circumstances; the use of others depends on the mental
characteristics of the writer; and there are still other rules, the
application of which is determined by the writer’s taste alone.
By gestures, tones of voice, oratorical pauses, emphasis, and in
various ways, a speaker can make his meaning clear to his listeners;
and so a writer should certainly use all the aids which punctuation,
capitals, and italics afford, in presenting clearly what he has written
for the perusal of others. Business men, however, seem to think that
they are not amenable to the rules that govern good writers. They
affirm that they have no time to punctuate their letters, and yet they
subject others to the necessity of expending time and patience in
trying to make out their meaning. Serious misunderstandings have
arisen between business men, in consequence of the omission or
incorrect use of punctuation marks, and expensive lawsuits have
originated in the careless punctuation of legal instruments.
Very little attention is paid in our public schools to punctuation, and
the rules usually given in English Composition are either disregarded
or not properly understood. This may, perhaps, be accounted for by
the fact that the rules are wanting in clearness, and are not
sufficiently illustrated by examples. The aim of this volume is to
remedy, in some measure, these evils, and to secure more attention
to what ought to be a prominent part of school instruction. The evils
of bad punctuation are really more serious than the evils of bad
spelling, and no student can be said to have learned to read well,
much less to write well, who has not studied punctuation intelligently.
We would suggest that this hand-book be used at Rhetorical
Exercises, and that when essays, orations, criticisms, &c., are
handed to the teacher for correction, he should use a red or a blue
pencil, so that corrections may be the more readily recognized.
Besides the corrections in grammar, spelling, &c., he should be
careful to supply punctuation marks when needed, cross out
needless ones, and, of course, make such other corrections as may
be necessary. When the productions are returned to the pupils, the
teacher should first point out the necessity of using certain marks, in
order to define and bring out the meaning, and to show the relation
between the different members of a sentence. Having thus shown
the need of punctuation marks, then reference should be made to
some of the simpler rules, to impress this need on the mind. Great
care should be taken not to perplex the mind with too many rules
before the necessity is created for their use. The great difficulty in
the study of punctuation has been that many rules are committed to
memory before the need of their use has arisen, so that the mind is
perplexed and bewildered instead of enlightened. The rule, it must
be remembered, does not create the necessity; the necessity
creates the rule. Then, again, we think a great mistake is made by
having the beginner punctuate what some one else has written. The
better plan is for the pupil, at the very outset, to punctuate what he
himself has composed, and in his effort to bring out his own meaning
clearly, he will, with the aid of a few rules, almost intuitively fall into
the habit of punctuating correctly.
The following suggestions may be of service:—
1. Do not give a pupil a rule to learn, unless it is clearly founded
upon examples taken from what he himself has written.
2. Take, at first, the simplest, most frequently used, and most
readily understood rules.
3. Advance slowly, remembering that a few simple principles
clearly understood, are of much more practical benefit than a
number of misty rules hastily committed to memory.
In the preparation of this hand-book, the author is under
obligations to various authorities, but he is more especially indebted
to Wilson’s “Treatise on Punctuation.”
W. J. COCKER.
Adrian, Mich., Dec. 26, 1877.
Table of Contents.
I. Punctuation pp. 1-53
II. Capitals ” 54-70
III. Letter-Forms ” 71-100
IV. Proof-Reading ” 101-114
Punctuation.
Introduction.
The principal punctuation marks are,—
1. The Comma ,
2. The Semicolon ;
3. The Colon :
4. The Period .
The comma indicates a somewhat close relationship between the

parts of a sentence; the semicolon, a more distant relationship; the
colon indicates that the parts are almost independent of each other;
the period marks the close of a sentence, and indicates that a
thought is complete.
In simple sentences, when the words are closely united together,
and the relationship of the words to each other is readily perceived,
there is usually no need of any punctuation marks, except a period at
the close. It should always be borne in mind that punctuation marks
are used primarily to assist in bringing out the meaning of the writer,
and not to embellish a written or a printed page. In sentences made
up of parts that are closely related to each other, but, at the same
time, distinct in character, commas should be used. They are way-
marks for the accommodation of the reader. A production
unpunctuated presents as dreary a prospect to the reader, as the
level plain of Chaldæa presents to the perplexed traveler who has
lost himself among the sandy mounds on the banks of the
Euphrates, and has nothing by which to direct his course.
When the different parts of a sentence are somewhat
disconnected, and not closely related to each other, a semicolon or
colon should be used. Sentences are sometimes very long and
complicated. It is then necessary to separate the main divisions by
semicolons, and the smaller by commas. Sometimes the smaller
parts of a sentence are separated by commas and semicolons, and
the main divisions by colons.
The other marks in use are,—
1. The Interrogation Point ?

2. The Exclamation Point !
3. The Dash —
4. Marks of Parenthesis ()
5. Brackets []
6. Quotation Marks “‘’”
7. The Apostrophe ’
8. The Hyphen -
9. Miscellaneous marks.
THE COMMA.
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.
In order to properly understand some of the rules that are given in
the following pages, it is absolutely necessary to have a clear
understanding of the difference between a sentence and a clause. A
sentence is a combination of words expressing a complete thought,
and usually followed by a period; a clause is a distinct part of a
sentence. Some sentences are simple in form, and have but one
subject and one finite verb; as, “Language is part of a man’s
character.”—Coleridge. Other sentences are made up of clauses,
each clause having a subject and a verb; in other words, several
clauses are sometimes joined together to form one sentence; as,
“New forms of beauty start at once into existence, and all the burial
places of the memory give up their dead.”—Macaulay. It will be
easily seen that clauses will be more readily recognized with the eye,
and more easily comprehended, if they are separated from each
other by punctuation marks. This will be especially so, if the clauses
are long.
In preparing this hand-book, the aim has been to avoid, as much
as possible, the use of technical terms. Whenever such terms are
used, explanations will usually be found under the head of Remarks.
Rule I. Independent Clauses.—Independent clauses should be

separated from each other by commas.
examples.
“Savage was discomposed by the intrusion or omission of a
comma, and he would lament an error of a single letter as a great
calamity.”—Dr. Johnson.
“Man wants but little here below,

Nor wants that little long.”—Goldsmith.
“Take short views, hope for the best, and trust in God.”—Sydney
Smith.
remarks.
1. An independent clause is one that is not dependent on any other clause for
the completion of its meaning; as, Take short views | hope for the best | and trust in
God. Independent clauses are frequently connected by and, or, nor, but.
2. When the clauses are short and closely united, the comma may be omitted;
as, “Death had lost its terrors and pleasure its charms.”
3. When the clauses are long and divided into smaller portions by commas, they
should be separated from each other by semicolons. See Rule I. p. 23.
Rule II. Dependent Clauses.—Dependent clauses should be

separated from each other by commas.
examples.
“If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances
through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should
keep his friendship in constant repair.”—Dr. Johnson.
“When Dr. Franklin wished to gain his enemy, he asked him to do
him a favor.”
“Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest
with a vein of it.”—Lamb.
“Although we seldom followed advice, we were all ready enough to
ask it.”—Goldsmith.
remarks.
1. A clause is said to be dependent, when it depends on some other clause to
complete its meaning; as, When Dr. Johnson wished to gain his enemy | he asked
him to do him a favor. The first clause of this sentence would not be complete in
meaning without the second. Dependent clauses usually commence with if, when,
since, because, until, &c.
2. When clauses are closely connected, the comma may be omitted; as, Mozart
published some music when seven years of age.
Rule III. Relative Clauses.—1. A relative clause should be

separated from the rest of the sentence by a comma.
2. But the comma should be omitted, when the relative clause is
so closely connected with what precedes that it cannot be dropped
without destroying the sense.
examples.
1. “Men in a corner, who have the unhappiness of conversing too
little with present things.”—Swift.
“The waters are nature’s storehouse, in which she locks up her
wonders.”—Izaak Walton.
“He had on a coat made of that cloth called thunder-and-lightning,
which, though grown too short, was much too good to be thrown
away.”—Goldsmith.
2. “Althworthy here betook himself to those pleasing slumbers
which a heart that hungers after goodness is apt to enjoy when
thoroughly satisfied.”—Fielding.
“A man who is good for making excuses is good for nothing
else.”—Dr. Franklin.
“Like Cæsar, Cortes wrote his own commentaries in the heart of
the stirring scenes which form the subject of them.”—Prescott.
remarks.
1. Relative clauses are generally introduced by the relative pronouns who,
which, that, or what.
2. A comma should be placed before the relative clause, even when it is
necessary to complete the meaning of the antecedent,—
a. When the relative is immediately followed by a word or an expression
inclosed in commas; as, “As a man, he may not have deserved the
admiration which he received from those, who, bewitched by his
fascinating society, worshiped him nightly in his favorite temple at
Button’s.”—Macaulay.
b. When the relative has several antecedents that are separated from
each other by commas; as, “All those arts, rarities, and inventions,
which vulgar minds gaze at, the ingenious pursue, and all admire, are
but the relics of an intellect defaced with sin and time.”—South.
3. The words of which are sometimes preceded by a comma, even when they
are necessary to complete the meaning of the antecedent: as, “His mind was
formed of those firm materials, of which nature formerly hammered out the Stoic,
and upon which the sorrows of no man living could make an impression.”—
Fielding.
Rule IV. Parenthetical Words and Phrases. When single words

and phrases break the connection between closely related parts of a
sentence, they should usually be separated by commas from the rest
of the sentence.
1. Words used parenthetically,—
therefore,
indeed,
perhaps,
namely,
finally,
consequently,
however,
moreover,
nevertheless, &c.
2. Phrases used parenthetically,—
in short,
in truth,
of course,
in fact,
in a word,
you know,
in reality,
no doubt,
as it were, &c.
examples.
1. “As an orator, indeed, he was not magnetic or inspiring.”—G. W.
Curtis.
“There is, perhaps, no surer mark of folly, than to attempt to
correct the natural infirmities of those we love.”—Fielding.
“There is, however, a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a
virtue.”—Burke.
2. “I had grown to my desk, as it were, and the wood had entered
my soul.”—Lamb.
“In short, he is a memorable instance of what has been often
observed, that the boy is the man in miniature.”—Boswell.
remarks.
1. Words and phrases are said to be used parenthetically, when they obstruct,
as it were, the flow of the sentence, and might be dropped without destroying the
sense.
2. Whenever parenthetical words and phrases readily coalesce with the rest of
the sentence, it is better to omit punctuation marks; as, “I am therefore exceedingly
unwilling that anything, however slight, which my illustrious friend thought it worth
while to express, with any degree of point, should perish.”—Boswell.
3. A distinction should be made between words used parenthetically, and
adverbs qualifying particular words; as, “And with learning was united a mild and
liberal spirit, too often wanting in the princely colleges of Oxford.”—Macaulay.
“That, too, has its eminent service.”—Burke.
Rule V. Parenthetical Expressions.—Expressions of a

parenthetical character should be separated from the rest of the
sentence by commas.
examples.
“She was tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious
closet of good old English reading, without much selection or
prohibition, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome
pasturage.”—Lamb.
“He [Sheridan] who, in less than thirty years afterward, held
senates enchained by his eloquence and audiences fascinated by
his wit, was, by common consent both of parent and preceptor,
pronounced a most impenetrable dunce.”—Moore.
“It is clear that Addison’s serious attention, during his residence at
the university, was almost entirely concentrated on Latin poetry.”—
Macaulay.
remarks.
1. A distinction should be made between parenthetical words and parenthetical
expressions.
a. Parenthetical words can be omitted without destroying the sense. See
examples under Rule IV.
b. Parenthetical expressions obstruct the flow of the sentence, but can not
be omitted without either destroying the sense, or changing the
meaning intended to be conveyed. See examples given above.
2. When parenthetical expressions are short, or closely connected with the rest
of the sentence, it is better to omit punctuation marks.
3. Writers differ very much in omitting or using commas in parenthetical
expressions. It is sometimes immaterial whether punctuation marks are used or
not, but, in many cases, there are few rules so well adapted to bring out the
meaning of the writer.
Rule VI. Inverted Expressions.—Expressions which are not in

their natural order, are frequently separated from the rest of the
sentence by a comma.
examples.
“In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopædia
behind the rest of the world.”—Lamb.
“In all unhappy marriages I have seen, the great cause of evil has
proceeded from slight occasions.”—Steele.
remarks.
1. The natural order of the first sentence is, I am a whole Encyclopædia behind
the rest of the world in everything that relates to science.
2. When the inverted expression is closely connected with what follows, the
commas should be omitted; as,—
“Of Addison’s childhood we know little.”—Macaulay.
“That inward man I love that’s lined with virtue.”—Beaumont and Fletcher.
Rule VII. Short Quotations.—Short quotations should be

separated from what precedes by a comma.
examples.
The Italians say, “Good company in a journey makes the way to
seem shorter.”
A writer in Lippincott’s Magazine says, “It is the little courtesies
that make up the sum of a happy home.”
Schiller has said, “Men’s words are ever bolder than their deeds.”
remarks.
1. An expression resembling a quotation should be preceded by a comma; as,
“Therefore the question still returns, What is the First Principle of all things?”
2. Quotations and general statements introduced by that are frequently
preceded by a comma; as, “Tacitus says of Agricola, that he governed his family,
which many find to be a harder task than to govern a province.”—Arthur Helps.
3. When single words or a part of a sentence are quoted, a comma should not
be used; as, “His wife was a domesticated, kind-hearted old soul, who had come
with him ‘from the queen city of the world,’ which, it seemed, was Philadelphia.”—
Dickens.
4. Quotation divided. “A man could not set his foot down,” says Cortes, “unless
on the corpse of an Indian.”—Prescott.
5. When the quotation is a long one, it should be preceded by a colon.
Rule VIII. Person or Thing Addressed.—The name of the person

or thing addressed, together with its modifying words, should be
separated from the rest of the sentence by commas.
examples.
“Now, Macaulay, when I am gone, you’ll be sorry that you never
heard me speak.”—Sydney Smith.
“Why, Romeo, art thou mad?”—Shakespeare.
“My lords, we are called upon, as members of this house, as men,

as Christians, to protest against such horrible barbarity!”—Pitt.
remark.
When strong emotion is expressed, an exclamation point should be used; as, “O
Hamlet! thou hast cleft my heart in twain.”—Shakespeare.
Rule IX. Participial Clauses.—Participial clauses, having no

grammatical connection with the rest of the sentence, should be
separated from what follows, and, if they do not commence a
sentence, from what precedes, by commas.
examples.
“Success being now hopeless, preparations were made for a
retreat.”—Alison.
“Such being their general idea of the gods, we can now easily
understand the habitual tone of their feelings towards what was
beautiful in nature.”—Ruskin.
remark.
Being or having been is usually the sign of a participial clause.
Rule X. Verb Omitted.—When a verb, previously used, is omitted,

a comma usually takes its place.
examples.
“Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle;
natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to
contend.”—Bacon.
“Chaucer painted persons; Spenser, qualities.”
remarks.
1. When the comma takes the place of an omitted verb, the main clauses or
numbers should be separated by semicolons.
2. Sometimes a comma does not take the place of an omitted verb; as, “Some
books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and
digested.”—Bacon.
“Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact
man.”—Bacon.
Rule XI. Appositives.—A noun in apposition and its modifiers

should be separated by commas from the rest of the sentence.
examples.
“When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our
tenderness we repent of but our severity.”—George Eliot.
“The exploits of Mercury himself, the god of cunning, may be
easily imagined to surpass everything achieved by profaner
hands.”—Leigh Hunt.
remarks.
1. An appositive is a word, placed by the side of some other word to explain or
characterize it.
2. The comma should be omitted,—
a. When two nouns without modifiers are in apposition; as, Cicero the
orator was born near Arpinum. If the sentence was, Cicero, the
greatest of Roman orators, was born near Arpinum, commas would
be necessary.
b. When a noun and a pronoun are in apposition; as, Mercury himself
surpassed everything achieved by profaner hands.
c. When two pronouns are in apposition; as, He himself did this.
d. Between the parts of a person’s name; as, George William Curtis.
3. In annexing titles to a person’s name, whether the titles are abbreviated or
written in full, commas must be used; as, Richard Whately, D. D., Archbishop of

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Relevance Theory Recent

developments current challenges and

International Sport Business current issues future

Cancer Diagnostics and Therapeutics Current Trends

Beneficial Chemical Elements of Plants Recent

Medical Informatics and Bioimaging Using Artificial

Developments in Cognitive Radio Networks Future

Current and Future Developments in Surgery Volume 2

Trade Regionalism in the Asia Pacific Developments and

Biological Control: Global Impacts, Challenges and

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Editor Associate Editor

John Benjamins Publishing Company

the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence

© 2016 – John Benjamins B.V.

Introduction: Three decades of relevance theory 1

Part I. Issues on procedural meaning and procedural analyses

The speaker’s derivational intention 33

Cracking the chestnut: How intonation interacts with procedural

Reference assignment in pronominal argument languages:

Conceptual and procedural information for verb tense disambiguation:

Part II. Discourse issues

Relevance theory and contextual sources-centred analysis of irony:

Distinguishing rhetorical from ironical questions:

Part III. Interpretive processes

Relevance theory, epistemic vigilance and pragmatic competence 193

Evidentials, genre and epistemic vigilance 239

Part IV. Rhetorical and perlocutionary effects of communication

Rhetoric and cognition: Pragmatic constraints on argument processing 261

Perlocutionary effects and relevance theory 287

Conclusion: Some directions for future research

Three decades of relevance theory

Manuel Padilla Cruz

1. The relevance-theoretic revolution

– How do humans understand each other?

1.1 Intention, manifestness and cognitive environments

Like Grice (1975), Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) conceive of communication

The notion of manifestness is a remarkable innovation. A certain fact or assump-

more) individuals actually share some knowledge would require time-consuming

1.2 A theory based on two general principles

Although based on Gricean pragmatics, relevance theory builds on it by rejecting

1.3 An underlying key notion

a. The positive cognitive effects that information yields, or the improvements

1.4 A new conception of communication

The code model metaphorically depicted communication as a process in which

2. As a cognitive-pragmatic model, relevance theory focuses on comprehension and aims to

1.5 Utterances as metarepresentations

a. Negative and disjunctive sentences, which metarepresent possible informa-

When metarepresenting another individual’s thoughts or words, the speaker may

1.6 A new picture of comprehension

Decoding only yields a set of conceptual representations or logical form, which is

disambiguations, conceptual adjustments and reference-assignments; looking for

1.7 A new conception of the role of the speaker

of linguistic repertoires in order to generate specific cognitive effects that hearers

1.8 The conceptual-procedural distinction

Communication may now be metaphorically described as a ball where the speak-

2. Research within relevance-theoretic pragmatics

Research from a relevance-theoretic perspective has continued with renewed

Introduction: Three decades of relevance theory 1

The speaker’s derivational intention 33

Relevance theory, epistemic vigilance and pragmatic competence 193

Evidentials, genre and epistemic vigilance 239

Rhetoric and cognition: Pragmatic constraints on argument processing 261

Perlocutionary effects and relevance theory 287