Pragmatics, propositional and non-propositional effects: can a theory of utterance interpretation account for emotions in verbal communication?

Abstract

This article is about pragmatics and emotion. The main purpose of pragmatics is to account for utterance-interpretation processes in verbal communication. In recent years much of pragmatics research has been devoted to the understanding of propositional effects; that is, to cognitive effects on mental representations with propositional forms such as implicatures and explicatures. Little energy has been devoted to non-propositional effects; that is, to pragmatic effects that have no propositional formats and are mainly associated with emotional reactions such as fear, pleasure, joy, anguish, etc. Utterances are, however, often the causes of such non-propositional effects. This paper presents a general framework, Relevance Theory, which could account for non-propositional effects. The limits of these theoretical approaches are also exposed.