Submitted by tomash on 12 November, 2009 - 10:00.
The Department of English Language Acquisition and the PSYCHOLinguistics Reading Group invite you to a guest lecture by:
Dr Vladimir Žegarac
University of Bedfordshire
Phatic Communication and Relevance
This talk outlines a relevance theoretic analysis of the way utterances are interpreted in phatic exchanges and considers some objections to this analysis. A relevance-theoretic account of phatic communication is presented in the first part of the talk. I consider phatic communication as a special case of ostensive-inferential communication, and I try to show that what makes it special is the inferential route which the hearer follows in interpreting the utterance, rather than the cognitive mechanisms involved. In other words, phaticness is characterised as a property of interpretation of a communicative act. A communicative act is said to be phatic to the extent that its interpretation depends on the evidence presented by the act of communication itself, rather than by the meanings of the words used. This account has a number of advantages over alternative approaches. For example, it provides a natural explanation for the intuition that utterances are not merely phatic or non-phatic, but that phaticness is a matter of degree. In the second part of the talk, I consider some objections to the analysis of phatic communication presented in the first part. For example, it has been argued that Relevance Theory cannot deal with social aspects of human communication, that relevance-theoretic analysis is not adequately supported by empirical data, and that it is circular. I will address these criticisms by showing that they are based on implausible assumptions about the way information is passed on in human communication, about the nature of data which are input to pragmatic analysis and about the criteria for distinguishing the type of circularity which renders a theory vacuous from a more general sense in which all theories can be said to be circular. I will try to show that, these criticisms lose their force once the premises on which they are based are shown to be flawed.
Thursday, 19 November 2009, 5 p.m., room 601A
