25.1502, Review: Pragmatics; Semantics: Clark (2013)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-1502. Sun Mar 30 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.1502, Review: Pragmatics; Semantics:  Clark (2013)

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Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 07:24:46
From: Stavros Assimakopoulos [stavros.assimakopoulos at um.edu.mt]
Subject: Relevance Theory

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-3376.html

AUTHOR: Billy  Clark
TITLE: Relevance Theory
SERIES TITLE: Cambridge Textbooks in Lingustics
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Stavros Assimakopoulos, University of Malta

SUMMARY 

One of the latest additions to the ‘Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics’
series, Billy Clark’s ‘Relevance Theory’ is a state-of-the-art overview of the
popular cognitive account of pragmatics. In this respect, it aims to serve not
only as an accessible introduction for university students with an interest in
pragmatics, but also as a useful reference point for researchers familiar with
work within the field. This is clearly also mirrored in the structure of the
book’s contents: the first four chapters form part of an ‘Overview’ of the
main tenets of relevance theory (henceforth RT) against the Gricean background
of studying inferential pragmatics, while the latter eight discuss the issues
that have so far been in the forefront of the attention of relevance
theorists. A useful appendix summarising the key notions of RT is also
included at the end.

In the first chapter, Clark sets out to motivate the need for pragmatic
analysis, integrating it in the classic sentence-utterance-proposition
tripartite distinction. After delineating the domain of enquiry of the
framework as that of ostensive communication within the broader picture of
human cognition, he offers a number of examples of the classic phenomena that
call for an explanation along the lines of inferential pragmatics (e.g.
metaphor, irony, non-literalness, misunderstandings, etc.), and wraps up the
chapter with a brief outline of the two principles of relevance and the RT
comprehension heuristic.

Chapter 2 places RT within the broader picture of Gricean pragmatics,
providing a comprehensive exposition of Grice’s argumentation, followed by a
presentation of the criticisms that it has received from relevance theorists.
This in turn motivates the later overview of the differences between Gricean
and RT pragmatics. The chapter concludes with a sketch of Horn’s and
Levinson’s neo-Gricean approaches which are, however, not evaluated in the
light of RT.

The third chapter expands substantially on the brief outline of the RT
framework that was offered towards the end of the first chapter, introducing
in more detail the terminology used by relevance theorists and their technical
definition of “relevance” as a property of input to mental processing, while
also providing the rationale behind the exposition of the two principles of
relevance and the RT comprehension heuristic.

In the fourth chapter, which concludes the ‘Overview’ part of the book, Clark
takes on the theoretically charged term “inference” with a view to presenting
how it is used in RT pragmatics. In this respect, he describes the notions of
deductive and non-demonstrative inference, paving the way for the subsequent
discussion of the inferences that we spontaneously make in our everyday
interactions and the predictions that RT makes with respect to the particular
subset of these inferences that pertain to the interpretation of communicative
acts.

Chapter 5 deals with the question of which aspects of verbal communication
belong to the explicit and which to the implicit side, moving from the Gricean
distinction between “what is said” and “what is implicated” to the linguistic
underdeterminacy thesis and the notion of “explicature” that follows from it
within RT. This notion is then concretised through the discussion of the two
pragmatic processes that are taken to contribute to an utterance’s basic
explicature for RT; on the one hand, the process of linguistically mandated
bottom-up inferential enrichment which is exemplified through the analysis of
ambiguity, indexicality and ellipsis as phenomena that give rise to it and on
the other, that of top-down free enrichment which is exemplified mainly
through the RT treatment of generalised conversational implicatures à la Grice
as implicitly communicated aspects of explicatures. The chapter concludes with
a brief overview of alternative approaches to the division of labour between
explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning.

Chapters 6 and 7 respectively deal with the different types of explicature and
implicature that RT has put forth. Apart from suggesting how both explicatures
and implicatures can be communicated with more or less strength, in chapter 6,
Clark distinguishes between an utterance’s basic explicature and higher-level
ones, and in chapter 7, he motivates the RT distinction between implicated
premises and implicated conclusions, and describes how their derivation is
accounted for within the framework.

Chapter 8 touches on the fairly recent developments in the field of lexical
pragmatics and briefly outlines the RT account of “ad hoc concept”
construction and the mechanisms of “narrowing” and “broadening” that are put
forth in its exposition.

In chapters 9 and 10, Clark turns to figurative language, and more
specifically metaphor and irony in turn. Chapter 9 starts with a demonstration
of the traditional distinction between literal and non-literal utterances as
well as the RT distinction between descriptive and interpretive
representations. Then the author presents the Gricean approach to metaphors,
contrasting it with both the earlier RT view of metaphor (and hyperbole) as a
kind of loose use that conveys an array of weak implicatures, as well as the
later one that analyses metaphors (and hyperboles) as communicating ad hoc
concepts, which, in this picture, form part of an utterance’s explicature. The
subsequent discussion of irony starts off with a description of the treatment
of irony as echoic interpretive use within RT, which is then contrasted with
the corresponding Gricean and pretence-theoretic analyses. Finally, chapter 10
concludes with a short summary of Happé’s classic study (1993), which
vindicates RT’s claim that different levels of metarepresentation are required
for the comprehension of metaphor and irony.

The penultimate chapter provides an overview of the account of linguistic
semantics that RT assumes, which is largely on a par with the Fodorian
picture, and then focuses on the RT notion of “procedural meaning”, discussing
how it relates to conceptual meaning as well as how it fares against Grice’s
notion of conventional implicature and where it fits in the study of truth
conditionality. Then, before eventually turning to the properties that
procedural expressions are most likely to have, Clark substantiates, through
the use of a set of examples, the RT claim that procedural encodings can act
as constraints on both the basic and higher-level explicatures as well as
implicatures, much like conceptual meaning can contribute to all three kinds
of communicated meaning.

The twelfth and final chapter of the book starts off with a mention of the
changes in the framework that were also noted in the ‘Postface’ of the second
edition of ‘Relevance’ (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995) and moves on to explore
how pragmatic theory in general (and RT in particular) can both affect and be
affected by research based on intuition, corpus analysis, and behavioural
experimentation, as well as the analysis of texts and misunderstandings. Clark
then turns to briefly suggest how RT can be useful for research pertaining to
first and second language acquisition, translation, and evolution, before
discussing where the RT account fits in contemporary theorising about the
human cognitive system. In the conclusion to the book, he briefly notes how RT
has been implemented in other fields of research, such as stylistics, prosody
and politeness, and mentions several other accounts with comparable agendas to
that of RT, which the reader can refer to in order to develop a more informed
understanding of the issues at hand.

EVALUATION 

The need for a specialised textbook on RT has been long-standing, since, with
the exception of a number of short handbook entries (e.g. Wilson & Sperber
2004, Carston & Powell 2005, Yus 2010, Clark 2011, Assimakopoulos forthcoming)
and pragmatics textbook chapters that can understandably only cover the
basics, an authoritative source that provides a detailed overview of the
framework and incorporates the latest advances in the theory has been lacking
for quite a while -- the latest such attempt was made over 20 years ago, with
the excellent, yet now somewhat out-dated ‘Understanding Utterances’
(Blakemore 1992).

That said, research connecting RT to other fields, such as stylistics,
discourse analysis or even anthropology and translation studies has been so
prolific that it would have been practically impossible to cover everything
that RT has touched on in a single volume. For this reason, Clark’s textbook
focuses almost exclusively on what can be considered as the ‘mainstream’ areas
of interest for the relevance theorist, and more particularly those issues
that are related to the study of linguistic pragmatics. Therefore, students
and researchers who have a more peripheral interest in RT are bound to find
the ‘Overview’ part more relevant for their purposes, with the latter one
being more useful to those working in the field of linguistic pragmatics. That
said, what is unfortunately missing from the textbook is a chapter or at least
a long section on RT’s alternative to coherence-based accounts of discourse,
which has not only been quite influential but has also generated a fair amount
of heated debate.

Regardless of these rather understandable limitations, the textbook does the
job impressively well. For one, it is surprisingly easy to follow, making
quite complex ideas accessible to even absolute beginners through the use of
clear language, appropriate examples and comprehension questions/exercises
that are wisely interspersed in the text rather than at the end of each
chapter. Then, it can also be a valuable source of information even for the
more advanced reader, as it summarises research from a variety of sources in a
concise manner. To this effect, sections like 2.4 and 2.5, which not only
discuss but also motivate RT’s departure from Grice, chapters 9 and 10, which
cross-examine the treatment of metaphor and irony in RT and competing
accounts, or sections 11.2, 11.3 and 11.4, which outline RT’s view of
semantics, can be useful reference points for researchers, who would otherwise
need to go through a diverse number of primary sources to get the information
therein.

Regarding what I find to be the book’s main shortcomings, I believe that they
can both be justified, given the very nature of textbooks as authoritative
sources of knowledge in a field or theoretical framework. On the one hand,
some of the arguments put forth in RT have been controversial, generating a
lot of heated debate, which is sometimes only mentioned quite briefly and not
given the attention it deserves. A characteristic example of this would be the
implications that RT carries for the delineation of the semantics/pragmatics
divide and the criticism it has received from scholars of a more philosophical
orientation on these grounds (cf. Cappelen and Lepore 2005, 2007, among quite
a few others). On the other hand, there are certain aspects of RT that
continue to be researched quite productively. For instance, the ‘ad hoc
concept’ account of metaphor that is presented in chapter 9 has been recently
challenged and developed further by Carston (2010a, 2010b) and Carston &
Wearing (2011), in research that I suspect is not referred to in the textbook
as it is still work in progress.

All in all, I find Clark’s ‘Relevance Theory’ to be a very well-informed and
well-structured as well as carefully and clearly written textbook on the
framework. I would not only use it with even absolute beginners in a course on
RT but would also recommend it as a starting point for more advanced readers
interested in particular issues in the pragmatics literature.

REFERENCES

Assimakopoulos, S. forthcoming. Relevance. In Anne Barron, Gerard Steen & Gu
Yueguo (eds.) The Routledge handbook of pragmatics. Oxon: Routledge.

Blakemore, Diane. 1992. Understanding utterances. Oxford: Blackwell.

Cappelen, Herman & Ernie Lepore. 2005. Insensitive semantics: A defense of
semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism. Oxford: Blackwell.

Cappelen, Herman & Ernie Lepore. 2007. Relevance theory and shared content. In
Noel Burton-Roberts (ed.), Pragmatics, 115-135. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Carston, Robyn. 2010a. Metaphor: Ad hoc concepts, literal meaning and mental
images. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 110(3). 295-321.

Carston, Robyn. 2010b. Lexical pragmatics, ad hoc concepts and metaphor: From
a relevance theory perspective. Rivista di Linguistica 22(1). 153-180.

Carston, Robyn & George Powell. 2005. Relevance theory: New directions and
developments. In Ernest Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford handbook of
philosophy of language, 341-360. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Carston, Robyn & Catherine Wearing. 2011. Metaphor, hyperbole and simile: A
pragmatic approach. Language and Cognition 3(2). 283-312.

Clark, Billy. 2011. Recent developments in relevance theory. In Dawn Archer &
Peter Grundy (eds.), The pragmatics reader, 129-137. Abingdon: Taylor &
Francis.

Happé, Francesca. 1993. Communicative competence and theory of mind in autism:
A test of relevance theory. Cognition 48(2). 101-119.

Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson. 1986/1995. Relevance: Communication and
cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. (2nd edition with postface, 1995.)

Wilson, Deirdre & Dan Sperber. 2004. Relevance theory. In Laurence Horn &
Gregory Ward (eds.), Handbook of pragmatics, 607-632. Oxford: Blackwell.

Yus, Francisco. 2010. Relevance theory. In Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog (eds.),
The Oxford handbook of linguistic analysis, 679-701. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

After his PhD in theoretical pragmatics at the University of Edinburgh and a
postdoctoral appointment in philosophy at the University of Granada, Stavros
Assimakopoulos is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Linguistics
of the University of Malta. His research lies in the interface of linguistics,
philosophy and cognitive psychology and mainly focuses on the implications
that cognitive approaches to inferential pragmatics, such as the one offered
by Relevance Theory, carry for the study of linguistic meaning.








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