1 A Unitary Approach to Lexical Pragmatics: Relevance, Inference and Ad Hoc Concepts * (2009)
According to recent work in the new field of lexical pragmatics, the meanings of words are frequently pragmatically adjusted and fine-tuned in context, so that their contribution to the proposition...
Making connections – linguistic or pragmatic? ∗ (2009)
Robyn Carston, Bergljot Behrens
The –ing adjunct, by its very form, invites an inference to the effect that two event descriptions are very closely related. Consider the following examples: (1) Thorstein and his students often...
Introduction: Representation and Metarepresentation 1 (2009)
María José Frápolli, Robyn Carston
“Utterances and thoughts have content: They represent (actual or imaginary) states of affairs. ” This is the opening statement of François Recanati’s most sustained work on kinds
1 Linguistic Communication and the Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction (2009)
Most people working on linguistic meaning or communication assume that semantics and pragmatics are distinct domains, yet there is still little consensus on how the distinction is to be drawn. The...
Relevance Theory – New Directions and Developments (2009)
As a post-Gricean pragmatic theory, Relevance Theory (RT) takes as its starting point the question of how hearers bridge the gap between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. That there is such a gap...
Richard Breheny, Richard Breheny, Napoleon Katsos, John Williams, Robyn Carston, ...
An on-line investigation into the role of context in generating pragmatic inferences
1. Introduction Informativeness, Relevance and Scalar Implicature * (2009)
The main topic of this paper is the phenomenon of scalar implicature. Typical examples are given
Metaphor and the 'Emergent Property' Problem: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach (2008)
The interpretation of metaphorical utterances often results in the attribution of emergent properties; these are properties which are neither standardly associated with the individual constituents of...
1. Introduction Relevance Theory and the Saying/Implicating Distinction (2007)
It is widely accepted that there is a distinction to be made between the explicit content
A standard view of the semantics of natural language sentences or utterances is that a sentence has a particular logical structure and is assigned truth-conditional content on the basis of that...
To appear in Lingua The pragmatics of sentential coordination with and* (2007)
Diane Blakemore, Robyn Carston
It is well known that utterances of certain and-conjunctions communicate a range of temporal and consequence relations between the states of affairs described by their conjuncts, and there are well...
The Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction. (2007)
Robyn Carston, Claudia Bianchi Ed
this paper, I shall start by looking at some of Stephen Levinson's recent observations about the problem underdeterminacy poses for the classical Gricean account and go on to consider the...
Code and Inference: The Meaning of Words in Context (2006)
C. Fabricius-hansen, B. Behrens, M. F. Krave, Robyn Carston, Regine Eckardt
hosted by the Project SPRIK “SPRåk I Kontrast”
Metaphor and relevance: The ‘emergent property’ issue. Talk delivered at New (2005)
Abstract: The interpretation of metaphorical utterances often results in the attribution of emergent properties, which are neither standardly associated with the individual constituents in isolation...
Linguistic meaning, communicated meaning and cognitive pragmatics (2002)
Within the philosophy of language, pragmatics has tended to be seen as an adjunct to, and a means of solving problems in, semantics. A cognitive-scientific conception of pragmatics as a mental...
The relationship between generative grammar and (relevancetheoretic) pragmatics (2000)
Abstract: The generative grammar approach to language seeks a fully explicit account of the modular systems of knowledge (competence) that underlies the human language capacity. Similarly, the...
Negation, ‘presupposition’ and metarepresentation: a response to Noel Burton-Roberts (1999)
Metalinguistic negation (MN) is interesting for at least the following two reasons: (a) it is one instance of the much broader, very widespread and various, phenomenon of metarepresentational use in...
Negation, ‘Presupposition’ and the Semantics / Pragmatics Distinction (1998)
Negation, `presupposition ' and the semantics/ pragmatics distinction A cognitive pragmatic approach is taken to some long-standing problem cases of negation, the so-called presupposition denial...
The semantics/pragmatics distinction: a view from relevance theory (1998)
Many different enterprises go under the title of semantics or semantic theory. For each of these, there must be a correspondingly different conception of pragmatics, at least in those cases where...
Within relevance theory the two local pragmatic processes of enrichment and loosening of linguistically encoded conceptual material have been given quite distinct treatments. Enrichments of various...
Enrichment and Loosening: Complementary Processes in Deriving the Proposition Expressed (1996)
Within relevance theory the two local pragmatic processes of enrichment and loosening of linguistically encoded conceptual material have been given quite distinct treatments. Enrichments of various...
Metalinguistic negation and echoic use (1994)
The metalinguistic use of 'not ' has been brought to prominence by the work of Laurence Horn, who characterizes it as a marked, non-truth-functional use of negation, not reducible to the...