The chapters in this volume apply the methodology of relevance theory to develop accounts of various pragmatic phenomena which can be associated with the broadly conceived notion of style. Some of them are devoted to central cases of figurative language (metaphor, metonymy, puns, irony) while others deal with issues not readily associated with figurativeness (from multimodal communicative stimuli through strong and weak implicatures to discourse functions of connectives, particles and participles). Other chapters shed light on the use of specific communicative styles, ranging from hate speech to humour and humorous irony. Using the relevance-theoretic toolkit to analyse a spectrum of style-related issues, this volume makes a case for the model of pragmatics founded upon inference and continuity, understood as the non-existence of sharply delineated boundaries between classes of communicative phenomena.

This book illustrates the potential of Relevance Theory (RT) in offering a cognitive-pragmatic, cause-effect account of translation and interpreting (T&I), one which more closely engages T&I activity with the mental processes of speakers, listeners, writers, and readers during communicative acts. The volume provides an overview of the cognitive approach to communication taken by RT, with a particular focus on the distinction between explicit and implicit content and the relationship between thoughts and utterances. The book begins by outlining key concepts and theory in RT pragmatics and charting the development of their disciplinary relationship with work from T&I studies. Chapters draw on practical examples from a wide range of T&I contexts, including news media, scientific materials, literary translation, audiovisual translation, conference interpreting, and legal interpreting. The book also explores the myriad applications of RT pragmatics-inspired work and future implications for translation and interpreting research. This volume will be of interest to scholars in T&I studies and pragmatics.

Encompasses a wide range of approaches from classical rhetoric to cognitive neuroscience Comprises 33 chapters, each providing an introduction to the subject, an overview of its history, an instructive example of how to conduct a stylistic analysis, a section with recommendations for practice and a discussion of possible future developments in the area for readers to follow up on Includes four newly commissioned chapters in the emerging fields of cognitive grammar, forensic linguistics, the stylistics of children’s literature and a corpus stylistic study of mental health issues

Despite the fact that they are often crucial to our understanding, the vague, ineffable elements of language use and communication have received much less attention from linguists than the more concrete, effable ones. This has left a range of important questions unanswered. How might we account for the communication of non-propositional phenomena such as moods, emotions and impressions? What type of cognitive response do these phenomena trigger, if not conceptual or propositional? Do creative metaphors and unknown words in second languages and other ‘pointers’ to ‘conceptual regions’ communicate concepts learned from language alone? How might the descriptive ineffability of interjections, free indirect speech etc. be accommodated within a theory of communication? What of those working on the aesthetics of artworks, music and literature? What can evolution tell us about ineffability? The papers in this volume address these fascinating questions head-on. They represent a range of different attempts to answer them and, in so doing, allow us to pose exciting new questions. The aim, to bring the ineffable firmly within the grasp of theoretical pragmatics.

This book examines audiovisual translation (AVT) practices that fall outside conventional AVT norms, drawing on work from relevance theory to highlight alternative perspectives and make the case for a multidisciplinary approach to AVT. The volume focuses on creative subtitling – otherwise known as 'text-on-screen' – through the lens of relevance theory, a cognitively grounded theory of communication. Sasamoto explores the ways in which a relevance theoretic approach can provide an analytical framework for a better understanding of the interaction between 'text-on-screen' and viewers' interpretation processes and, in turn, how media producers, professional or otherwise, use 'text-on-screen' to engage viewers in innovative ways. The volume looks at such forms as telop, creative text use on screen, and forms of user-generated text-on-screen. The book introduces a new dimension to work on cognative pragmatics and the wider applications of relevance theory in multimodal communication and AVT, making it of interest to scholars in these disciplines.

In 1992, shortly after the publication of the first edition of Relevance: communication and cognition, David Trotter wrote: “Relevance theory is not only the most elegant version of pragmatics currently available, but the most uncompromising in its view that inference cannot be assimilated to a code model of communication. It asks questions which literary criticism has never been able to ask, let alone answer”. Thirty years on, new questions continue to be asked (and answered) in linguistic pragmatics, cognitive science, literary theory (as foreseen by Trotter), experimental psychology, affective science, communication studies etc. The theory also appears in quite unexpected places: recent applications of relevance theory include the analysis of internet-mediated discourse, clinical practice and even museum curation. First and foremost, however, relevance theory is an inferential model of communication and cognition which is theoretically and empirically testable. The approach still has a huge amount of potential in psychology and beyond, potential this Research Topic seeks to tap into.

No serious attempt to answer the question 'What is hate speech?' would be complete without an exploration of the outer limits of the concept(s). This book critically examines both the ordinary and legal concepts of hate speech, contrasting social media platform content policies with national and international laws. It also explores a range of controversial grey area examples of hate speech. Part I focuses on the ordinary concept and looks at hybrid attacks, selective attacks, reverse attacks, righteous attacks, indirect attacks, identity attacks, existential denials, identity denials, identity miscategorisations, and identity appropriations. Part II concentrates on the legal concept. It considers how to distinguish between hate speech and hate crime, and examines the precarious position of denialism laws in national and international law. Together, the authors draw on conceptual analysis, doctrinal analysis, linguistic analysis, critical analysis, and diachronic analysis to map the new frontiers of the concepts of hate speech.

This book offers a systematic, bottom-up account of irony across both everyday contexts and literary and linguistic texts, using an empirically rigorous approach in distinguishing between central irony, non-central ironies, and non-ironies and highlighting a new way forward for irony research. The volume considers the current landscape of irony, in which the term is used with increasing frequency with the knock-on effect of a loosening of its meaning. Pattison addresses this challenge by applying a systematic form of analysis, rooted in frameworks from pragmatics and complementary disciplines, to a database of over 500 irony candidates from a wide range of sources. The book uses these examples to illustrate the features of central ironies as well as the attributes used to differentiate between central ironies, non-central ironies, and non-ironies. These attributes are mapped across four key domains, including: difference and opposition; the role of context; how ironies are signaled; and speaker attitude and intention. Taken together, the volume puts forth a credible account for more clearly characterizing examples of irony and equips researchers with a comprehensive step-by-step method for undertaking future research. This book is key reading for scholars in stylistics, pragmatics, literary studies, and psycholinguistics.

This book offers a pragmatic account of the interpretation of everyday metaphorical and idiomatic expressions. Using the framework of Relevance Theory, it reanalyses the results of recent experimental research on figurative utterances and provides a novel account of the interplay of creativity and convention in figurative interpretation, showing how features 'emerge' during metaphor comprehension and how literal meaning contributes to idiom comprehension. The central claim is that the mind is rather selective when processing information, and that in the pragmatic interpretation of both literal and figurative utterances, this selectivity often results in the creation of new ('ad hoc') concepts or the standardization of pragmatic routines. With this approach, the comprehension of metaphors and idioms requires no special pragmatic principles or procedures not required for the interpretation of ordinary literal utterances, but follows from an automatic tendency towards selective processing which is itself a by-product of Sperber and Wilson's Cognitive Principle of Relevance.

This collection of papers arises from a meeting of relevance theorists held in Osaka, May 29-30, 1993. Speakers at the conference included both of the originators of the theory, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, the editors of this volume and several other Japanese linguists and pragmatists, all of whose work is included. The full breadth and richness of relevance theory is represented here, both in its applications to problems of utterance interpretation, that fall squarely within the domain of pragmatics, and its implications for linguistic semantics. Several papers investigate and assess the theory’s account of figurative uses of language, such as irony, metaphor and metonymy. Other central pragmatic issues include a relevance-driven account of generalized implicature, the role of bridging implicatures in reference assignment, the way in which different intonation patterns contribute to the relevance of an utterance and the application of the theory to literary texts. The recently developed semantic distinction between conceptually and procedurally encoded meaning, motivated by relevance-theoretic considerations, is employed in new accounts of several Japanese particles and in a fresh perspective on the phenomenon of metalinguistic negation. The volume comes with a comprehensive glossary of relevance-theoretic terms.