How can we tell what's relevant when we try to work out what other people mean? What can experiments tell us about how much we'll consider when puzzling out meaning? In this week's episode, we talk about relevance theory: how it can help us more scientifically approach relevance in our discussions, how it interacts with the rest of our understanding of the rules of conversations, and how we can play with relevance in experiments to make people more or less likely to behave in logical ways.
This is Topic #61!
This week's tag language: Quechua!
Related topics:
The Rules of Conversation: Gricean Maxims - • Pragmatics and Gricean Maxims
Speaking of Science: Linguistics as a Science - • Linguistics as a Science
Last episode:
The Melody of Feet: Stress in Words - • How Do We Stress Our Words? Foot Stru...
Other of our semantics and pragmatics videos:
Building Common Ground: Shared Worlds in Conversation - • How Do We Create a Shared World in Co...
Let's Talk about Sets: Set Theory and Adjectives - • How Do We Build Meaning with Math? Se...
Clues to Meaning: Implicatures, Entailments, and Presuppositions - • Implicatures, Entailments, and Presup...
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Sources:
The information for this video was largely taken from Ira Noveck and Daniel Sperber's 2006 book entitled Experimental Pragmatics, primarily chapters 1 and 7, and Paul Grice's 1975 paper, Logic and Conversation.
Looking forward to next week!
The Ling Space