Relevance Relations in Discourse
A Study with Special Reference to Sissala

Using the language Sissala, this book offers convincing evidence that although cultural backgrounds may vary widely, principles involved in utterance interpretation are universal.

Regina Blass (Author)

9780521385152, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 November 1990

300 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.5 cm, 0.584 kg

"Regina Blass's book can be recommended to anyone interested in DA on a more advanced level and in particular to students of discourse of an interpretive orientation." Rask

This book uses Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory to show that connectivity in discourse is a pragmatic rather than a semantic matter: it results from relevance relations between text and context rather than from relations linguistically encoded in the text. In two introductory chapters, Regina Blass argues that relevance theory offers a more explanatory account of discourse connectivity than do alternative approaches based on notions of cohesion, coherence and topic. In subsequent chapters, she introduces data from the language Sissala and shows how relevance theory can play an important role in guiding and constraining semantic and pragmatic analyses of these data. This approach reveals unexpected results - for example the detection of an interpretive use marker in Sissala, with implications for the analysis of so-called 'hearsay phenomena' in other languages - and leads to an alternative basis for particle typology.

Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations and symbols
Maps
Introduction
1. What is discourse?
2. Relevance theory and discourse
3. The interpretive-use marker ré
4. Constraints on relevance and particle typology
5. Baa: truth-conditional or non-truth-conditional particle?
6. Defining in Sissala
7. Meanings and domains of universal quantification
8. Co-ordination and stylistic effects
Notes
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Semantics, discourse analysis, etc [CFG]