What is it about?
I use the relevance theory of Sperber and Wilson to bridge the fields of rhetoric and pragmatics. Rhetoric can be thought of as the study of the production of communication and pragmatics as the study of its interpretation. Both concern themselves with language-in-use and meaning-making beyond formal syntax and semantics. Previous efforts to link these fields have failed, but I sketch an adaptation of relevance theory that brings them together.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Other scholars have tried to see links between these fields, because they relate critically to meaning-making in human communication. This paper succeeds in making connections that others have struggled with.
Perspectives
As someone trained first in linguistics and then in rhetoric, I've struggled with "straddling" these two fields, with the pragmatics/rhetoric interface proving especially challenging. It seems so much of contemporary rhetorical theory addresses the reception of communicative performances without having a theory of how that works. Pragmatics, on the other hand, has always seemed less capable of dealing with practical realities of communicative performances, abstracting them away much like theoretical linguistics as a whole seemed to abstract away from practical realities. These fields have much to say to each other, and I really want this approach to be a bridge between them.
Dr. Brian N Larson
Texas A&M University System
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Bridging Rhetoric And Pragmatics With Relevance Theory, September 2018, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/9783110472509-004.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
