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2 - Language Processing, Relevance and Questions

from Part I - Relevance Theory and Cognitive Communicative Issues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 July 2019

By
Richard Breheny
Edited by
Kate Scott ,
Billy Clark  and
Robyn Carston
Kate Scott
Affiliation:
Kingston University, London
Billy Clark
Affiliation:
Northumbria University, Newcastle
Robyn Carston
Affiliation:
University College London
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Summary

The chapter begins by pointing out one particular success of relevance theory: its account of anticipatory processes in language comprehension and of the effects of stress placement on these processes. Richard Breheny aims to build on this by investigating pragmatic processes which anticipate the source of relevance (the intended context) rather than components of linguistic form or content. He reviews recent empirical work on the processing of questions and negation, and draws out its implications for the issue of how the source of relevance is represented in utterance processing. He finds in favour of the relevance-theoretic account and against the currently popular view in formal pragmatics that representations of context take the form of ‘questions under discussion’.

Keywords

focusfocal scalequestions and relevancelanguage processingnegationpolar questionsintonation and prosody
Type
Chapter
Information
Relevance, Pragmatics and Interpretation , pp. 42 - 52
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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