Relevance Theory

Wilson, Deirdre; Sperber, Dan

doi:10.1002/9780470756959.ch27

Cited by 388 publications

(533 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

492

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Relevance theory (Carston, 1998(Carston, , 2004Sperber & Wilson, 1995;Wilson & Sperber, 2004), on the other hand, approaches implicatures in a completely different way. This theory is grounded in the field of cognitive sciences.…”

Section: Everybody Goes To the Partymentioning

confidence: 99%

Some effort for some: Further evidence that scalar implicatures are effortful

Dieussaert

Verkerk

Gillard

et al. 2011

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

103

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Under the assumption of the principle of cooperation (Grice, 1989), a statement such as "some eels are fish" is thought to be false since it contains less information than is considered sufficient. However, the statement is logically sound since the meaning of "some" is compatible with "all". Currently, the primary interpretation of such underinformative statements remains subject to debate. According to Levinson (2000), the pragmatic "some but not all" interpretation is the default interpretation, while others (e.g., Sperber & Wilson, 1995) argue that this pragmatic interpretation only comes to the fore when relevant within the context and is thus considered secondary to the logical "some and perhaps all" interpretation. In this study, three factors that may influence the answer pattern are studied: task load, working memory capacity, and repetition of the statements. In Experiment 1, we used a secondary task paradigm to manipulate the cognitive load under which a number of underinformative statements had to be judged. We observed that for participants with a rather limited working memory span it is harder to reach a pragmatic interpretation under cognitive load. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the repetition of the statements. We observed that with a higher number of filler statements, participants produced fewer consistent answer patterns. This study provides further evidence against the automaticity of the pragmatic interpretation: It shows that the pragmatic interpretation requires more cognitive effort than the logical interpretation and that increasing the number of filler statements inhibits the development of a response strategy.

show abstract

Section: Everybody Goes To the Partymentioning

confidence: 99%

Some effort for some: Further evidence that scalar implicatures are effortful

Dieussaert

Verkerk

Gillard

et al. 2011

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

103

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…If we adopt the model proposed by RT, it can be that the expectations of relevance are satisfied without consulting everything that is stored in the lexical entry. According to RT, we follow a path of least effort, such that we test interpretive hypotheses in order of accessibility (Wilson and Sperber [2004]). So, the process of selection can stop at an early stage.…”

Section: Linguistic Comprehension and Rich Lexical Entriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Big Concepts Paper: A Defence of Hybridism

Vicente¹,

Manrique²

2016

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The renewed interest in concepts and their role in psychological theorizing is partially motivated by Machery's claim that concepts are so heterogeneous that they have no explanatory role. Against this, pluralism argues that there is multiplicity of different concepts for any given category, while hybridism argues that a concept is constituted by a rich common representation. This paper aims to advance the understanding of the hybrid view of concepts. First, we examine the main arguments against hybrid concepts, and conclude that, even if not successful, they challenge hybridism to find a robust criterion for concept individuation, and to show an explanatory advantage for hybrid concepts. Then we propose such a criterion of individuation, which we will call functional stable coactivation. Finally, we examine the prospects of hybridism to understand what is involved in recent approaches to categorization and meaning-extraction.

show abstract

“…We should note that whereas anaphor resolution is conceptualized as a semantic task in some linguistic accounts (see Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet, 1990;Kamp & Reyle, 1993), the inferences needed to disambiguate reference are often defined as pragmatic inferences (see Levinson, 2000;Wilson & Sperber, 2004). Although the psychological reality of the distinction between semantic and pragmatics is under debate (e.g., Gibbs, 1984;Jackendoff, 2002), one could argue that our study also speaks to the issue of how the semantic meaning of a word in a particular sentence context can influence the computation of its pragmatic meaning.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The interplay between semantic and referential aspects of anaphoric noun phrase resolution: Evidence from ERPs

Nieuwland

Berkum

2008

Brain and Language

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

a b s t r a c tIn this event-related brain potential (ERP) study, we examined how semantic and referential aspects of anaphoric noun phrase resolution interact during discourse comprehension. We used a full factorial design that crossed referential ambiguity with semantic incoherence. Ambiguous anaphors elicited a sustained negative shift (Nref effect), and incoherent anaphors elicited an N400 effect. Simultaneously ambiguous and incoherent anaphors elicited an ERP pattern resembling that of the incoherent anaphors. These results suggest that semantic incoherence can preclude readers from engaging in anaphoric inferencing. Furthermore, approximately half of our participants unexpectedly showed common late positive effects to the three types of problematic anaphors. We relate the latter finding to recent accounts of what the P600 might reflect, and to the role of individual differences therein.

show abstract

Relevance Theory

Cited by 388 publications

References 0 publications

Some effort for some: Further evidence that scalar implicatures are effortful

Some effort for some: Further evidence that scalar implicatures are effortful

The Big Concepts Paper: A Defence of Hybridism

The interplay between semantic and referential aspects of anaphoric noun phrase resolution: Evidence from ERPs

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About