The Semantics of Biblical Language: Reflections from Relevance Theory and Lexical Pragmatics

2021 ◽  
pp. 143-160
Keyword(s):  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Biblical Language

Discourse Analysis: Contextualism and Reductionism

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 440-447
Author(s):  
Setareh Majidi
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Contextual Factors ◽  
Relevance Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Language Interpretation

For the past twenty to thirty years, a good part of the domain of linguistics has been occupied by what has been called discourse analysis. Whereas syntax and semantics are concerned by the sentence and the units from which the sentence is built, discourse analysis claims that interpretation cannot accounted for at the level of the sentence and that a bigger unit, such as discourse should be used to account for language interpretation. We want to show here that discourse is not, in any sense, a well defined object and that, though it is certainly necessary to analyze how a given sequence of sentences is processed and understood, the notion of discourse,  A and related notions such as coherence does not have much to say about it. We rely on epistemological considerations about the necessity of a moderate reductionism and sketch on account of linguistic interpretation which accounts for contextual factors in linguistic interpretation through the notion of utterance (vs. sentence) and a development of Sperber & Wilsons Relevance Theory.

Alfred Schütz : une autre théorie de la pertinence et son application en traduction

Fachsprache ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 63-78
Author(s):  
Margarete Flöter-Durr ◽  
Thierry Grass
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Information Science ◽  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
Alfred Schutz ◽  
Legal Translation ◽  
Translation Techniques ◽  
Alfred Schütz ◽  
One Year

Despite the work of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (1989), the concept of relevance has not enjoyed the popularity it deserved among translators as it appears to be more productive in information science and sociology than in translation studies. The theory of relevance provides underpinnings of a unified account of translation proposed by Ernst-August Gutt. However, if the concept of relevance should take into account all parameters of legal translation, the approach should be pragmatic and not cognitive: The aim of a relevant translation is to produce a legal text in the target language which appears relevant to the lawyer in the target legal system, namely a text that can be used in the same way as the original source text. The legal translator works as a facilitator from one legal system into another and relevance is the core of this pragmatic approach which requires translation techniques like adaptation rather than through-translation or calque (in the terminology of Delisle/Lee-Jahnk/Cormier 1999). This contribution tries to show that relevance theory, which was developed in the field of sociology by Alfred Schütz, could also be applied to translation theory with the aim of producing a correct translation in a concrete situation. Some examples extracted from one year of the practice of an expert law translator (German-French) at the Court of Appeal in the Alsace region illustrate our claim and underpin an approach of legal translation and its heuristics that is both pragmatic and reflexive.

Relevance Theory and Literary Interpretation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deirdre Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Communicative Act ◽  
Sensorimotor Processes

This concluding chapter reflects in general terms on some aspects of relevance theory that have been fruitfully used in the analyses in this volume, and on some aspects of literary communication that have been seen by both supporters and critics of relevance theory as showing the need for modifications to the inferential mechanisms it proposes. After distinguishing comprehension (identifying the intended import of a communicative act) from interpretation (going beyond the intended import to draw one’s own conclusions), it discusses a range of stylistic and rhetorical effects—typically created by departures from expected syntax, lexis, or prosody—which provide tentative cues to ostension and therefore create greater expectations of relevance. It ends by considering how relevance theory might deal with the ‘non-propositional effects’ associated with images, emotions, and sensorimotor processes while remaining within the bounds of a properly inferential theory.

The Mind in Motion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elleke Boehmer
Keyword(s):  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Dynamic Tension ◽  
The Mind

Drawing on insights from relevance theory, the chapter explores how W.B. Yeats’s late poem ‘Long-legged Fly’ creates an exemplary occasion for reflecting first on cognition and then on the ways in which cognition might be made manifest in poetic language; in particular, here, in a dominant simile that repeats as a refrain through the poem. Processing the three stanzas’ different inferential, sensorimotor, and intertextual effects, we as readers at one and the same time contemplate in each case a body in thought, and we contemplate ourselves thinking. The poem in this sense repeatedly performs how a history-changing reflective moment holds a range of creative energies in dynamic tension. Relevance theory’s ‘loose’ sifting of literal and other meanings, in Deirdre Wilson’s words, allows us to become aware of these two processes unfolding at the same time, and in relation to each other, as is demonstrated in this close reading.

Reading Beyond the Code

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Communicative Acts ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Code Model ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Central Claim

This book explores the value for literary studies of relevance theory, an inferential approach to communication in which the expression and recognition of intentions plays a major role. Drawing on a wide range of examples from lyric poetry and the novel, nine of the ten chapters are written by literary specialists and use relevance theory both as an overall framework and as a resource for detailed analysis. The final chapter, written by the co-founder of relevance theory, reviews the issues addressed by the volume and explores their implications for cognitive theories of how communicative acts are interpreted in context. Originally designed to explain how people understand each other in everyday face-to-face exchanges, relevance theory—described in an early review by a literary scholar as ‘the makings of a radically new theory of communication, the first since Aristotle’s’—sheds light on the whole spectrum of human modes of communication, including literature in the broadest sense. Reading Beyond the Code is unique in using relevance theory as a prime resource for literary study, and is also the first to apply the model to a range of phenomena widely seen as supporting an ‘embodied’ conception of cognition and language where sensorimotor processes play a key role. This broadened perspective serves to enhance the value for literary studies of the central claim of relevance theory: that the ‘code model’ is fundamentally inadequate to account for human communication, and in particular for the modes of communication that are proper to literature.

Entering the Whirlwind

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Abraham
Keyword(s):  
Full Range ◽  
Biblical Theology ◽  
Divine Action ◽  
Divine Activity ◽  
Biblical Language ◽  
The 1960S

In the 1960s, Langdon Gilkey raised several philosophical issues regarding divine action in his paper “Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language.” This chapter engages Gilkey’s paper, and argues that philosophy can be applied to the initial efforts to deal with divine action in the debate which erupted in the wake of the Biblical Theology Movement that followed Gilkey’s paper. Enthusiastic advocates of divine action in the movement were attacked for failing to attend to the full range of divine action. This chapter indicates how and why efforts to develop a robust vision of divine action in the Biblical Theology Movement fell apart. The author focuses on the specific difficulties in the Biblical Theology Movement with respect to its claims about divine action, and positions this debate in a way that highlights the broad range of divine activity that anyone interested in divine action must attend to going forward.

Intimation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. R. F. Ferrari
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Erving Goffman ◽  
Strongly Connected ◽  
Dan Sperber ◽  
Paul Grice

The communicative scale is introduced. What is fundamental to communication is the intention of the communicator rather than the codes that languages employ. Following the model first proposed by Paul Grice and developed in Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s ‘relevance theory’, the structure of communicative intentionality is understood to be recursive: its underlying form is ‘I want you to know that I want you to know’. This leaves room for a simpler kind of transmission, to be called ‘intimation’, whose underlying form would be ‘I want you to know’. If communication is a transmission at the ‘full-on’ position of the scale, and if the switch is off when no communication is intended, then intimation would be at the intermediate, ‘half-on’ position. Intimation is particularly useful in contexts where discretion, suggestiveness, or plausible deniability are needed. It is strongly connected to self-presentation in social life (as studied by Erving Goffman).

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