Abstract
Discovering the nature and role of inferential mechanisms in language understanding is a distinctly common concern in work carried out both within Cognitive Linguistics and Relevance Theory. Cognitive linguists increasingly tend to see language-related inferences as a matter of the activation of relevant conceptual structures. This is generally accepted by relevance theorists; however, they tend to play down the importance of such structures in favour of pragmatic principles. This is evident in their treatment of phenomena like metaphor and metonymy, which are explained by them as a question of deriving strong and weak implicatures. In this paper we revise this treatment and argue in favour of dealing with metaphor and metonymy as cognitive mechanisms which provide us with explicit meaning or, as relevance theorists would put it, with sets of "explicatures". This allows us to reformulate the implicature/explicature distinction and to reconsider the way it works in relation to other phenomena which are also of concern to relevance theorists, like disambiguation in conjoined utterances.
Highlights
Linguistic messages have to be understood in their contexts
Situation in the Firthian sense but a richer notion which includes all the knowledge which the speaker brings to bear at the moment of producing and interpreting utterances. This knowledge consists of fairly stable sets of assumptions which have been called by cognitive linguists idealized cognitive models or ICMs2 and temporary assumptions, all of which come in degrees of strength
The account given above is at odds with the standard relevance-theoretic treatment of hyperbole given by Sperber & Wilson (1986: 235)
Summary
Linguistic messages have to be understood in their contexts. In this paper –following some recent trends in linguistics– ‘context’ is taken to mean not the context of. This is not the case with the processing of Peter’s response in (1) where his interlocutor is expected to understand that Peter is not willing to row up to the island because Peter finds that five miles is too much for him to row in his present physical conditions For this information to be retrieved by John, he needs to bring to bear complementary information and supplementary information, i.e. an additional relevant set of assumptions which will allow him to work out what the speaker means. This process is not always carried out on the basis of what is literally said; the utterance may require some previous development along the lines of what we have illustrated for the example in (2). We shall stick to the twofold implicature/explicature distinction, with the refinements which will be proposed below
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