26th June 2026:

In this presentation, I will examine the role of resemblance in multimodal communication from the perspective of relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995). Rather than treating resemblance in visual communication as a straightforward visual match between an image and what it represents, I will argue that resemblance is used to present evidence that helps the audience infer the communicator’s intentions. The focus is on examples such as visual metaphor and satirical or caricatural imagery, where resemblance is selective. In these cases, only certain perceptual features such as shape, texture, movement, spatial arrangement, or material behaviour are highlighted. These similarities guide the audience toward particular interpretations, whether the tone is serious, playful, critical, or humorous. For instance, presenting the Earth as melting ice cream relies on roundness and visible melting to encourage thoughts of vulnerability, heat, and urgency. A caricature of a politician may use exaggerated proportions or omitted detail to prompt thoughts related to attitude, ridicule, or evaluation. Resemblance in these examples provides perceptual cues that guide interpretation, yet it does not determine a single, determinate interpretation and leaves room for variation and weakly communicated assumptions, giving rise to impressions. On this view, perceptual resemblance is not a passive visual property but a pragmatic resource. I will, therefore, discuss in this presentation what it means to recognise one thing as perceptually resembling another, and how this recognition contributes to multimodal communication under relevance-driven expectations.

References

Sperber, D. & D. Wilson (1986/1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwells.

Affective Effects as Key Theoretical Tools for Prosodic-Pragmatic Analysis

This seminar explores the theoretical and analytical potential of affective effects—as developed in Wharton & de Saussure’s Pragmatics and Emotion (2023)—as central tools for prosodic-pragmatic research. Challenging the long-standing division between “reason” and “emotion” in semantics and pragmatics, Wharton & de Saussure argue that emotional meaning is not peripheral, but constitutive of human communication. Their model integrates affective science with Relevance Theory, proposing that utterance interpretation relies not only on conceptual inferences, but also on patterns of affective activation that guide attention, shape contextual selection, and constrain inferential routes in systematic, measurable ways.

Building on this framework, the seminar shows how primary and secondary affective effects—anticipatory, transfer-based, and inferentially generated—provide new explanatory leverage for multimodal analysis. Prosodic, facial, and gestural cues operate as “natural codes” that trigger affective effects in real time, promoting fast, subcortical evaluation pathways while interacting with slower, propositional reasoning. This dual-route perspective helps to explain why certain prosodic contours, voice qualities, or facial configurations exert powerful pragmatic force even when their contribution is ineffable or impossible to paraphrase. The presenters will demonstrate how these affective mechanisms can be operationalised in multimodal transcription and in empirical studies of speech, drawing attention to the communicative work accomplished by cloud-like, non-propositional content.

The seminar will also present original data on simultaneous interpreting, drawing on a corpus on EU Parliament speeches, involving seven languages. Wharton & de Saussure’s “affective machinery” offers a predictive model of how emotion-laden source speech influences interpreter processing, output patterns, and audience uptake. The presenters will show how affective effects—activated through source-speech prosody, lexical choices, or embodied displays—shape interpreters’ anticipatory processing, segmentation decisions, mitigation or intensification strategies, and multimodal alignment with the speaker. Particular attention will be paid to the systematicity of these effects and to the extent to which they can be empirically traced through acoustic measures. Together, these threads argue for an expanded, affect-aware pragmatics which treats emotional meaning not as an optional add-on, but as a fundamental dimension of relevance. Through theoretical framing and data-driven illustration, the seminar positions affective effects as indispensable tools for the next generation of prosodic-pragmatic and multimodal research.

The Pragmatics of Enjambment

Enjambment, the continuation of a syntactic unit across a poetic line break, is a common poetic device whose effects on interpretation have received limited attention from a cognitive pragmatic perspective. This thesis investigates enjambment theoretically and experimentally within a relevance-theoretic framework. It explores how line breaks that disrupt syntactic and semantic completion may function as ostensive pragmatic cues that attract attention and guide readers’ inferential processing.

Drawing on literary critical descriptions of enjambment as producing seemingly contradictory effects such as suspense or tension as well as movement or flow, the thesis argues that such effects can be understood as fluctuations in processing effort during poetic reading. Building on previous relevance-theoretic accounts of literary interpretation and poetic effects, it develops an empirically informed approach to enjambment. The theoretical account is illustrated through a relevance-theoretic close reading of Lucille Clifton’s poem daughters and tested experimentally using a self-paced reading task comparing total reading times for enjambed and non-enjambed poetic lines. The results show that enjambed lines are associated with a small but statistically significant increase in total reading time, consistent with increased overall processing effort.

This thesis proposes that enjambment attracts attention and modulates inferential processing by prompting readers to resolve a tension between pausing at the end of a poetic line and continuing forward to complete the syntactic or semantic structure before integrating meaning across the line break.

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).