[...] the book brings to us the advantage and significance of relevance theory in its application and implicature to describing utterance interpretation. The insights and applications presented in this book will surely provide a model for future studies on verbal communication and human cognition. [...] The book deserves the attention of those who work in the fields of pragmatics, linguistics, discourse analysis and language teaching.
- Xinzhang Yang, Xiamen University, China,
[...] the compendium of research included in this volume is, indeed, a major source of information about the <i>state of the art</i> in relevance-theoretic research, and highly advisable reading for any analyst interested in S&W's theory, or in human interpretation in general.
- Francisco Yus, University of Alicante, Spain, in Journal of Pragmatics 3, 1999,
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.