Phatic communication and Relevance Theory: a reply to Žegarac & Clark

Abstract

Recent work in Relevance Theory (henceforth RT) illustrates the coming of age of modern pragmatic scholarship in creating an environment in which a particular theory of pragmatics can be taken for granted, without explanation or justification, and an analysis of a phenomenon previously unaccounted for within that theory can be advanced. One is reminded of much of the recent syntactic work within GB/Principles & Parameters/Minimalist Theory: the dominance of the Chomskyan approach – particularly in certain geographic regions – allows researchers, for better or worse, to simply assume the correctness of the theory in their work and proceed to illustrate how that theory might (or must) be extended or modified to accommodate a new class of data. In this volume, Žegarac & Clark (1999) provide the latest illustration of a similar strategy in pragmatics: the correctness of RT is assumed and an analysis of ‘phatic communication’ proposed within that framework. On the one hand, this constitutes an advance for pragmatic theory, since until recently there was no comprehensive all-inclusive framework within which certain pragmatic generalizations could be stated. If nothing else, RT has served to raise a number of important issues surrounding the semantics-pragmatics interface, helping to crystallize the debate and make explicit many assumptions that had been either implicit or non-existent in other frameworks. In particular, RT work on scalar implicature/explicature and on echoic mention and metalinguistic negation (e.g. Carston 1988, 1995; Récanati 1989) has represented major advances in our understanding of these phenomena and their theoretical implications. Thus, whatever one may think of RT, it is a theory that must be taken seriously by anyone working in this area. On the other hand, we find that RT suffers from one of the principal afflictions of the aforementioned work in the GB/P&P/Minimalism mainstream: a remarkable failure to address, come to terms with, and incorporate the extensive previous literature on the topic under current consideration.