In Chapter 1, we introduce the subject of pragmatics and cover some basic concepts, definitions, and topics that will be central to the ideas discussed in the rest of the book. We begin with some definitions of pragmatics, and a key distinction is made between approaches which focus on social factors, and those which take a more theoretical approach. We move on to think about the role that context plays in interpretation. This leads us to a key distinction between sentences and utterances, with utterances as the focus of pragmatics. We then consider two different ways in which meaning may be communicated: via code and via inference. As we will see, inference plays a central role in the interpretation of utterances. Next, we discuss the idea that the identification of intention lies at the heart of utterance interpretation. This leads to a discussion of the cognitive abilities that are thought to underlie inferential processes, including mindreading, metarepresentation, and theory of mind. We look at what it means to be able to have thoughts about other people’s thoughts and why this is key for pragmatic processing.

Humans have two kinds of beliefs, intuitive beliefs and reflective beliefs. Intuitive beliefs are a fundamental category of cognition, defined in the architecture of the mind. They are formulated in an intuitive mental lexicon. Humans are also capable of entertaining an indefinite variety of higher-order or "reflective" propositional attitudes, many of which are of a credal sort. Reasons to hold reflective beliefs are provided by other beliefs that describe the source of the reflective belief as reliable, or that provide an explicit argument in favour of the reflective belief. The mental lexicon of reflective beliefs includes not only intuitive, but also reflective concepts.

This chapter introduces mindreading (the ability to understand others' thoughts and to interact with them socially). The first section looks at childrens' pretend play behavior and how it is explained by Leslie's metarepresentation models. The second section addresses the false belief test, which was developed to detect whether young children can understand that other people might hold misleading information about their environment. The third section introduces Baron-Cohen's model of the mindreading system, explaining data from different paradigms, such as the false belief test in normal or autistic children. The fourth section looks at an alternative approach -- the simulation theory, which hypothesizes that we predict other people by simulating how we would react if we received the same information. The last section reviews recent neural evidence on mindreading mechanisms.

Jary and Kissine examine the meaning of imperative sentences, taking the existing relevance-theoretic semantic analysis, in terms of the desirability and potentiality of the described state of affairs, as their point of departure. In their view, a complete account of the interpretation of imperatives has to explain how they can result in the addressee forming an intention to perform an action, and this requires the theory to make room for ‘action representations’ (in addition to factual representations, such as assumptions). They claim that the imperative form is uniquely specified to interface with such action representations.

Nicholas Allott considers how relevance theory can be seen as responding to doubts about the possibility of any kind of systematic pragmatic theory. He considers three sceptical positions: Fodor’s argument that pragmatic processes are not amenable to scientific study because they are unencapsulated (highly context-sensitive), Chomsky’s claim that human intentional action is a mystery rather than a scientifically tractable problem, and a third view which maintains that intentional communication is too complex for systematic study. Allott argues that work in relevance theory can be seen as successfully challenging these sceptical views and he gives concrete examples of its achievements.

Eleni Gregoromichelaki and Ruth Kempson present a range of arguments and data, including cases of split utterances, in support of their position that even syntax should be construed in terms of the linguistic underspecification of utterance content and incremental context-relative processing. This approach to language (which they call ‘Dynamic Syntax’) is fundamentally different from orthodox generative grammar and conceptualises syntax as procedures for interaction.

This volume of chapters on topics in relevance theory has been assembled in honour of Deirdre Wilson, with all its chapters written by former students and/or colleagues of hers. My aim is to describe the impact of Deirdre’s presence on the linguistics scene in London and the significance of her work in establishing the new sub-discipline of pragmatics. This work shaped the development of our thinking (hence our research and teaching) on a range of linguistic issues, especially in the realm of meaning.

The chapter addresses the concept of ‘explicature’, a notion which has been central to relevance theory from its inception and which introduced a radically new way of thinking about explicitly communicated meaning and about the semantics–pragmatics distinction. Victoria Escandell-Vidal focuses here on how utterances of particular expressions in Spanish (some occurrences of the verb estar and some uses of 3rd-person imperfective forms) lead to ‘higher-level’ explicatures expressing a speaker’s evidential commitment. She argues that the evidential meaning does not arise from the semantic composition of linguistically encoded content but rather emerges as the optimal solution to a ‘feature mismatch’ between two components of encoded meaning.

The editors of the volume asked me to provide a broad overview of the beginnings of relevance theory back in the 1970s, how it has developed over the decades and where I see it moving in the future, reflecting in the process on the collective work that Deirdre Wilson and I initiated and that has been joined and considerably enriched by many others. Here are some personal notes to help address these questions.

In this chapter, Jacques Moeschler addresses some complex issues about the function of negation and its interaction with metarepresentation.He identifies three distinct uses of negation, namely, descriptive negation and two kinds of metarepresentational negation (one metalinguistic, the other presupposition-cancelling), which differ in their semantic entailments. His key claim is that all three of them have what he calls ‘representational’ (or propositional) effects on the context, specifically the elimination and/or the strengthening of existing assumptions, albeit different for each of the uses.