Relevance and Linguistic Meaning: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse Markers

Diane Blakemore

сент. 2002 г. · Cambridge Studies in Linguistics Книга 99 · Cambridge University Press

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The importance of discourse markers (words like 'so', 'however', and 'well') lies in the theoretical questions they raise about the nature of discourse and the relationship between linguistic meaning and context. They are regarded as being central to semantics because they raise problems for standard theories of meaning, and to pragmatics because they seem to play a role in the way discourse is understood. In this new and important study, Diane Blakemore argues that attempts to analyse these expressions within standard semantic frameworks raise even more problems, while their analysis as expressions that link segments of discourse has led to an unproductive and confusing exercise in classification. She concludes that the exercise in classification that has dominated discourse marker research should be replaced by the investigation of the way in which linguistic expressions contribute to the inferential processes involved in utterance understanding.

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Diane Blakemore is Professor of Linguistics at the European Studies Research Institute and School of Languages, University of Salford. She is the author of Semantic Constraints on Relevance (1987) and Understanding Utterances (1992), as well as a range of articles in relevance theoretic pragmatics in publications including Journal of Linguistics, Lingua, Pragmatics and Cognition, and Linguistics and Philosophy.