Abstract
This talk discusses ideas about how to develop an account of the production of communicative acts in a relevance-theoretic approach. It focuses, in particular, on how communicators make inferences about their addressees’ expectations of relevance and how these expectations affect their communicative behaviour.
Current pragmatic theories with roots in a Gricean approach, including relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995), are often criticised for being hearer-centred and not fully explaining what links speakers’ assumptions and addressees’ interpretation (see, for example, Kecskés 2008, 2013; Franke et al. 2012; Yuan et al 2019). Despite these concerns, this talk argues that the relevance-theoretic account of communication can help to explain production processes. The relevance theoretic account has developed successful explanations of interpretation processes focusing on what addressees might infer from the behaviour of other communicators. This suggests a starting point for an account of production processes.
This talk explores some theoretical ideas related to production. It discusses the relevance-theoretic account based on the principles of relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995) and a relevance-focused production heuristic (Park, 2022; Park and Clark 2022), as well as psycholinguistic perspectives (Levelt 1989; Bock and Levelt 1994; Gibbs and Colston, 2020), activity types (Levinson 1992), and turn-taking (Sacks et al. 1974; Levinson and Torreira 2015). These approaches provide insights into potential considerations for production.
The talk also discusses some empirical work, including a picture description task and story retelling tasks, which were conducted in order to explore what communicators might focus on when they formulate their utterances. The participants were assigned the role of a babysitter during these tasks. They were given tasks which asked them to imagine that they were communicating with a specific audience in a scenario depicted in an image. The results showed that the participants made assumptions about their audiences by categorising the group memberships of their addressees. The participants’ communicative behaviour differed depending on these expectations of relevance.
Also, the pair of friends were recruited to observe actual interactions. Each participant engaged in two online audio calls: one with their best friend and the other with a stranger. The interactions were compared to explore how they made assumptions about their interlocutors and adjusted their production. This also showed that the participants in the interactions spontaneously make assumptions about the expectations of relevance of their addressees based on their categorisation of their addressees’ group memberships.
References
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Franke, M., De Jager, T., and R. Van Rooij. 2012. Relevance in Cooperation and Conflict. Journal of Logic and Computation. 22(1), pp.23-54
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Park, K. H. 2022. Relevance Theory and the Pragmatics of Production. PhD Thesis. Northumbria University
Park, K. H. and B. Clark. 2022. A Relevance-Focused Production Heuristic. Journal of Pragmatics. 187, pp.176-185
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Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 1986/1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Wilson, D. And D. Sperber. 2002. Truthfulness and relevance. Mind. 111, pp. 583-632. Reprinted in Wilson and Sperber 2012. Meaning and Relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Yuan, W., Lin, F. Y. and R. P. Cooper. 2019. Relevance theory, Pragmatic Inference and Cognitive architecture. Philosophical Psychology. 32, pp.98-122
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