Searching for relevance: pragmatics and affective science

Illuminating Pragmatic Proficiency: Corpus-Based Assessment of Implicature in Secondary Classrooms

This talk reports on a corpus-pragmatics approach to assessing pragmatic proficiency, focusing on implicature comprehension and production in high-school learners. Drawing on classroom corpora and public dialogue datasets, I operationalise implicature types (e.g., scalar, relevance, manner) and annotate learner responses with reliability checks. I then introduce a lightweight rubric that integrates frequency, felicity, and repair strategies, and compare human ratings with rubric-assisted scores. Results indicate that rubric-guided corpus prompts improve inter-rater agreement and surface teachable patterns (e.g., hedging, contrastive connectives) that predict successful implicature recovery. I close with classroom assessment tasks, open materials, and a roadmap for scaling the method in low-resource contexts.

Recording Coming Soon!

23 May 2025

This free one-day online conference will bring scholars together to share their latest work in relevance theory across different fields. By showcasing a wide range of topics, we aim to provide a platform for fruitful discussions to reconfirm the explanatory power of the theory and its potential.

Conference topics: We welcome all and any contributions grounded in relevance theory. There is no limit on specific topics, but we welcome ideas that engage fully with relevance theory, as well as interdisciplinary contributions.

The conference will consist of two plenary lectures and a programme of full papers. Full papers will be 20 minutes with 10 minutes for discussion.

Submissions: We invite original submissions that fully engage with relevance theory or apply relevance theory in pragmatics and other related areas. We also welcome interdisciplinary contributions from researchers of various disciplines. Submissions should be 300 words or less and fully anonymised. Please email your submission to relevance.researchers@gmail.com by 16 December 2024.

Important dates:

• Deadline for Submission of abstracts: 16 December 2024
• Notification of acceptance: Mid-February 2025
• Registration from 1 April 2025

Abstracts of all accepted papers and recordings of all presentations will be made available online through RRN’s website.

Organising committee: Ryoko Sasamoto (Nara Women’s University, Japan) and Kate Scott (Kingston University, UK)

Please use the following email address to contact the organisers: relevance.researchers@gmail.com

Relevance Researchers’ Network Conference 2025

23 May 2025

This free one-day online conference will bring scholars together to share their latest work in relevance theory across different fields. By showcasing a wide range of topics, we aim to provide a platform for fruitful discussions to reconfirm the explanatory power of the theory and its potential.

Conference topics: We welcome all and any contributions grounded in relevance theory. There is no limit on specific topics, but we welcome ideas that engage fully with relevance theory, as well as interdisciplinary contributions.

The conference will consist of two plenary lectures and a programme of full papers. Full papers will be 20 minutes with 10 minutes for discussion.

Submissions: We invite original submissions that fully engage with relevance theory or apply relevance theory in pragmatics and other related areas. We also welcome interdisciplinary contributions from researchers of various disciplines. Submissions should be 300 words or less and fully anonymised. Please email your submission to relevance.researchers@gmail.com by 16 December 2024.

Important dates:

• Deadline for Submission of abstracts: 16 December 2024
• Notification of acceptance: Mid-February 2025
• Registration from 1 April 2025

Abstracts of all accepted papers and recordings of all presentations will be made available online through RRN’s website.

Organising committee: Ryoko Sasamoto (Nara Women’s University, Japan) and Kate Scott (Kingston University, UK)

Please use the following email address to contact the organisers: relevance.researchers@gmail.com

In this online session, Sperber and Wilson discussed their new paper “Rethinking Ostensive Communication in an Evolutionary, Comparative, and Developmental Perspective”. A preprint of a paper can be downloaded from https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/zp3fx

A playlist with recordings of the session is available via our YouTube channel

Eriketti Metaxa (NKUA)

Jasmina Pasic (Northumbria)

Mat Smith (Brighton).

Abstract

Speakers:

Rongyu Wang (Dublin City)

Chara Vlachaki (Brighton)

Marianna Vraka (NKUA)

Abstract

In lieu of a presentation, I will be sharing with you some ideas that I have been considering in relation to the place of relevance theory – and its associated account of utterance comprehension – within the domain of linguistic pragmatics, in the hope that this will lead to an open discussion about the remit (and perhaps limits) of the framework in this vein. More specifically, I will focus on the distinction between comprehension and interpretation and its implications for the study of the territory beyond the communicator’s intended import. On this basis, I will then turn to the thorny question of what – if anything – an account of cognitive pragmatics can tell us about the very nature of human language and the evolution of externalised languages into efficient semiotic systems that underlie communication.