In this chapter, Anne Furlong demonstrates a new application of relevance theory through a discussion of how relevance is achieved when adapting a ‘literary’ work from one communicative medium into another (e.g. from written text into film). She argues that adaptations should be understood as communicative acts in their own right, so as falling under the presumption of optimal relevance like any other ostensive act, and suggests that assumptions about the source texts can form part of the context in which that new communicative act is interpreted.

Ingrid Lossius Falkum uses data from young children’s communicative development to argue that metaphor and metonymy rely on different pragmatic mechanisms. Metaphor and metonymy do have certain characteristics in common: they both target individual words or phrases, they both contribute content to the proposition explicitly expressed, and they both lie on a continuum of literal and figurative uses. However, developmental data suggests that early metonymic uses may be the result of a more basic process than metaphorical uses, one in which the child exploits salient associative relations to compensate for gaps in vocabulary.