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

by Diane Blakemore

Overview

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. Diane Blakemore asserts 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521640077
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/26/2002
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Linguistics , #99
Pages:	212
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.63(d)
Lexile:	1580L (what's this?)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Meaning and truth; 2. Non-truth conditional meaning; 3. Relevance and meaning; 4. Procedural meaning; 5. Relevance and discourse; Conclusion.

Editorial Reviews

'Relevance and Linguistic Meaning raises a number of interesting and important issues … it is a well-structured and accessibly written book …'. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia

From the Publisher