Diane Blakemore

Indicators and procedures : nevertheless and but

The paper aims to clarify the Relevance theoretic notion of procedural meaning (cf. Blakemore 1987, Wilson & Sperber 1993) through the analysis of but and nevertheless . I show, first, that a procedural analysis is able to account for differences between these expressions that cannot be explained in terms of the speech-act theoretic notion of non-truth conditional indicators, and, second, that these differences show that the conception of procedural meaning as a constraint on contextual effects (cf. Blakemore 1987) is too narrow and must be extended to include all information about the inferential processes involved in utterance interpretation, including context selection.

The relevance of reformulations

Some of the phenomena in this paper are traditionally classified as loose appositions. This classification is shown to be too restrictive to provide an explanatory analysis of all cases of reformulation in discourse. Following Sperber and Wilsons (1986) suggestion that style arises out of the pursuit of optimal relevance, it is argued that deliberate reformulations are a stylistic device designed to achieve particular contextual effects. The analysis of a range of both literary and non-literary examples shows that there is a variety of ways in which a reformulation may achieve relevance. In a technical text a reformulation may constrain the interpretation of the original for the purpose of ensuring a more accurate understanding of a particular concept and hence a greater understanding of the surrounding text. In other cases the hearer is rewarded by an array of weak implicatures, in which case we may say the reformulation achieves poetic effects comparable with those achieved through repetition.

Apposition and affective communication

This article focuses on the rhetorical effects of structures that involve the apposition of two (or more) segments with similar, but not identical, interpretations — for example, He felt depressed, flattened. Building on existing relevance theoretic accounts of poetic effects, it aims to show how these structures can be used to communicate an impression of emphasis or intensification that can be compared with the effects achieved by repetitions. It argues that these effects are not achieved in the same way, and that three different cases can be distinguished. First, the use of this structure may lie in the way it encourages the reader to explore the differences between the interpretation of the second segment and the interpretation of the first. Second, it may encourage the reader to explore the total set of contextual assumptions made accessible by both (or all) segments for the derivation of an interpretation that cannot be derived from any one segment alone. Finally, the article considers the use of these structures by authors who use free indirect style to represent a characters struggle to identify an emotion s/he is experiencing.

Communication and the representation of thought: the use of audience directed expressions in free indirect thought representations

This paper examines the use of audience-directed or inherently communicative expressions(discourse markers and interjections) in free indirect thought representations in fiction. It argues that the insights of Banfield’s (1982) no-narrator approach to free indirect style can be accommodated in a relevance theoretic framework. The result is an account in which the author’s act of revealing a character’s thoughts communicates a guarantee of optimal relevance – a guarantee which justifies the effort which the reader invests in deriving meta-representations of those thoughts from the evidence which the author provides. However, the reward for this effort is a meta-representation of a character’s thoughts which is unmediated by the thoughts of the author who is responsible for producing the text. Using examples from fiction, I show that within this framework, the use of procedurally encoded discourse markers and interjections contribute to this sense of immediacy by imposing constraints on interpretation which leave the reader with the responsibility for deriving his own interpretations of a character’s thoughts and thought processes.

Relevance, Poetic Effects and Social Goals: A Reply to Culpeper

Culpeper’s dissatisfaction with my relevance theoretic account of reformulations in ‘The relevance of reformulations’ (henceforth RR) is derived from a dissatisfaction with relevance theory in general. In particular, he argues that this account of reformulations illustrates the inability of relevance theory to deal with the emotional and social dimensions of verbal communication. Cognitive approaches to utterance understanding are often charged with excessive narrowness and asceticism.* However, as I hope to show, this derives from a misconception about the domain of cognitive approaches to pragmatics namely, that they are restricted to the ‘information giving’ function of language. where this is narrowly defined, centring on the proposition expressed together with others logically or contextually implied by it.

Parentheticals and point of view in free indirect style

This article explores the functions of parentheticals in Free Indirect Style (FIS), and in particular their role in enabling the author to represent thoughts from a variety of perspectives — including his own. I argue that while there is a sense in which a FIS text can achieve relevance by creating a sense of mutuality that is unmediated by the presence of the author, there are also features which allow the author to signal his own attitudes towards the characters whose thoughts he is representing. Indeed, as Dillon and Kirchhoff (1976) and Fludernik (1993) have shown, an author is able to communicate a sense of ironic distance even if he does not necessarily explicitly comment on his characters. Using examples from Katherine Mansfield, Malcolm Lowry and Virginia Woolf, I show that parentheticals play a role both in establishing a sense of affective mutuality between reader and character and in establishing a sense of irony by placing represented thoughts in a ludicrous light.