Abstract

Feelings and emotions, typically non-propositional, play an important part in the eventual quality of the interpretations to which they are attached. However, relevance theory has preferred to focus on how hearers build up propositions that fill the gap between what is meant and what is eventually inter-preted (Carston 2002). These are easier to handle, possess a mental representation and are a genuine ob-ject of analysis for linguistics (Chapman 2001, Garcia-Carpintero 2010, Moeschler 2009). In this paper, a review is provided of several ways in which feelings and emotions play an important part in the even-tual quality of interpretations, specifically focusing on irony (Yus 2016a, 2016b) and Internet-mediated communication (Yus 2016c, forthcoming).

Highlights

  • Pragmatics deals with intentionally conveyed information; relevance theory ( RT) further specifies its scope by claiming that it deals with ostensive-inferential communication, the one in which the communicator produces a stimulus which makes it mutually manifest to communicator and audience that the communicator intends, by means of this stimulus, to convey to the audience some information (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 63)

  • What about the communication of feelings and emotions or the speaker’s overall affective attitude? These are utterly important and may alter radically the eventual interpretation obtained and the relevance yielded by the act of communication

  • Affective attitude ascription should be incorporated into the RT model of irony comprehension, together with dissociative attitude and source of the echo, and the goal of a cognitive pragmatics should be to provide an account of how this affective attitude is spotted and how it influences the comprehension of the propositional content

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

Pragmatics deals with intentionally conveyed information; relevance theory ( RT) further specifies its scope by claiming that it deals with ostensive-inferential communication, the one in which the communicator produces a stimulus which makes it mutually manifest to communicator and audience that the communicator intends, by means of this stimulus, to convey to the audience some information (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 63). As such, it mainly focuses on propositional information. Two exemplifying cases are briefly commented upon: irony comprehension and online identity

RELEVANCE THEORY AND PROPOSITIONAL COMMUNICATION
AFFECTIVE ATTITUDE
PRAGMATICS AND NON PROPOSITIONAL INFORMATION
TWO CASE STUDIES
Irony comprehension
Online identity
CONCLUDING REMARKS
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