Search results for ""Author Deirdre Wilson""

Book SynopsisWhen people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is a process of inference guided by precise expectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics and the thoughts that humans are capable of entertaining and conveying? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations, metaphors and ironies? Is the ability to understand speakers' meanings rooted in a more general human ability to understand other minds? How do these abilities interact in evolution and in cognitive development? Meaning and Relevance sets out to answer these and other questions, enriching and updating relevance theory and exploring its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies.Trade Review'… significantly expands upon [the authors'] groundbreaking 1986/1995 book Relevance: Communication and Cognition, and nicely situates relevance theory within contemporary developments in cognitive science … a masterful scholarly achievement that correctly places mind and relevance as the essential site for the scientific study of meaning and cognition.' Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr, University of California, Santa Cruz'Wilson and Sperber are not merely the promoters of an influential framework in linguistic pragmatics, which this book beautifully illustrates; their pioneering work has implications for a wide range of disciplines, from evolutionary psychology to literary theory, and is of special interest to philosophers of language and mind.' François Recanati, Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, Paris'Twenty-five years ago, Sperber and Wilson published Relevance, Communication and Cognition: this was a major breakthrough in pragmatics. Philosophers and cognitive scientists intrigued by the subtle mapping between concepts and words should delve right away into their new Meaning and Relevance.' Pierre Jacob, Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, ParisTable of ContentsIntroduction: 1. Pragmatics; Part I. Relevance and Meaning: 2. The mapping between the mental and the public lexicon; 3. Truthfulness and relevance; 4. Rhetoric and relevance; 5. A deflationary account of metaphors; 6. Explaining irony; Part II. Explicit and Implicit Communication: 7. Linguistic form and relevance; 8. Pragmatics and time; 9. Recent approaches to bridging: truth, coherence, relevance; 10. Mood and the analysis of non-declarative sentences; 11. Metarepresentation in linguistic communication; Part III. Cross-disciplinary Themes: 12. Pragmatics, modularity and mindreading; 13. Testing the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance; 14. The why and how of experimental pragmatics; 15. A pragmatic perspective on the evolution of language.

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Book SynopsisRelevance, first published in 1986, was named as one of the most important and influential books of the decade in the Times Higher Educational Supplement.Trade Review‘This book … is very likely to become a classic, not only because of its potential implications for linguistics, cognitive psychology and anthropology, but because of the range and originality of the theory it proposes.’ – Pascal Engel, Revue Philosophique ‘Cognitive science is very often marred by demarcation disputes and protectionist attitudes which have little or no rational basis. Occasionally, however, it works as it should and a book appears which reaches across the bread and butter lines which institutional life forces upon us. Relevance is, I think, such a book.’ – Alan Leslie, Mind and Language. ‘The repercussions of Relevance are likely in the long run to be great – felt first, perhaps, in the pragmatics of conversation, the philosophy of language, and reader-response criticism, but also in many other activities: construction of memory models, pedagogy, machine learning and (doubtless) advertising and propaganda.’ – Alastair Fowler, London Review of Books ‘I recommend this book to people interested in linguistics, philosophy of language and pragmatics, and, definitely, to people who cultivate an interest in semiotics.’ – Umberto Eco, L’Expresso ‘This is probably the best book you’ll ever read on communication.’ – Rhetoric Society QuarterlyTable of ContentsPreface to Second Edition. List of symbols. 1. Communication. 2. Inference. 3. Relevance. 4. Aspects of Verbal Communication. Postface. Notes to First Edition. Notes to Second Edition. Notes to Postface. Bibliography. Index.

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