Synopses & Reviews
The importance of discourse markers (words like "so," "however," and "well") lies in the theoretical questions they raise about the nature of discourse and the relationship between linguistic meaning and context. Diane Blakemore asserts that the exercise in classification that has dominated discourse marker research should be replaced by the investigation of the way in which linguistic expressions contribute to the inferential processes involved in utterance understanding.
Synopsis
In this new and important study of the analysis of discourse markers, Diane Blakemore argues that the exercise in classification that has dominated discourse marker research should be replaced by the investigation of the way in which linguistic expressions contribute to the inferential processes involved in utterance understanding.
About the Author
Diane Blakemore is Professor of Linguistics at the European Studies Research Institute and School of Languages, University of Salford. She is the author of Semantic Constraints on Relevance (1987) and Understanding Utterances (1992), as well as a range of articles in relevance theoretic pragmatics in publications including Journal of Linguistics, Lingua, Pragmatics and Cognition, and Linguistics and Philosophy.
Table of Contents
Introduction; 1. Meaning and truth; 2. Non-truth conditional meaning; 3. Relevance and meaning; 4. Procedural meaning; 5. Relevance and discourse; Conclusion.