Metaphor interpretation and motivation in relevance theory

Abstract

Relevance theory has long been taken as a theory focusing on hearer's recognition of intention and her/his inference of speaker's implicatures based on explicatures. Recently, Kecskes (2010) takes a new Socio-cognitive Approach (SCA) to pragmatics based on his critique of relevance theory. In this paper, we argue that his critique is flawed on several points. First, the hearer-centered notion of relevance is not completely correct. Rather, relevance theory does not ignore speaker's role in the course of communication. We analyze the process of metaphor interpretation to show that relevance theory is a full-fledged theory taking into consideration the roles of both speaker and hearer in communication. Second, the motivation problem is not totally ignored by relevance theory, either. We argue that there have been three pressures to motivate metaphor interpretation as well as communication, namely, the pressure of being relevant, the pressure of embodiment and the pressure of context, which constitute the three primary motivations for metaphor interpretation.