The Positive Research on the Validity of Relevance Theory in Communication

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The aims of this study are, first, to investigate the shortcomings of Grice's cooperative principle, Levinson's Q/I/M implicatures, Leech's politeness principle, and speech act theories, from a relevance-theoretic point of view ; and, second, to analyze utterance interpretation performed in TV interview programs and daily conversations in order to validate this relevance-theoretic approach.Traditional pragmatic approaches to meaning have not accounted for utterance interpretation in a cognitively sound way because they have mainly focused on the classification of utterance meanings. Unlike these top-down approaches, relevance theory has a bottom-up approach by taking all of the stages of meanings involved in utterance interpretation into account, and minutely describes the inferential process in which the encoded meaning by utterance is recovered into explicature and enriched into implicature through on-line pragmatic inferences. Such description is based on the precise distinction bet … More ween explicit meaning and implicit meaning of utterance, hypothesis formation, and accessible contextual assumptions.The conversations of the TV interviews differ from the daily conversations in how explicature and implicature are inferentially enriched, according to the quality and quantity of the knowledge shared by participants and the conversational goals. On the recovery of explicature, the major elements of the sentence can be easily saturated in the case of the TV interviews because the knowledge shared by the interviewer is larger in quantity and definite in quality, and this differentiates the TV interviews from the daily conversations. On the enrichment of implicature, both types of conversations differ in the conversational goals, though they both aim to derive an implicature of the utterance. The interviewers on TV programs attempt to derive a true sense (i.e. implicature) from the guest's utterance for viewers, whereas the addressees in daily conversations tend to derive it in order to confirm their interpretation of the utterance. Less