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Article published In:
Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 26:2/3 (2019) ► pp.215–238

Poly-procedural meaning and rhetoric

The case of afu in Modern Greek

| Aristotle University of Thessaloniki , Greece

The current paper aims to explore the meaning of one of the most elusive discourse markers in Modern Greek rhetorical discourse: afu. To address the challenge of a thorough and parsimonious account, the relevance-theoretic model of meaning analysis is deployed. The analysis undertaken ultimately reveals that the marker at hand encodes procedural meaning in standard relevance-theoretic terms. However, unlike traditional relevance-theoretic approaches linking a marker to a single procedural function, the current one proposes that afu encodes a poly-procedural constraint on the implicated content of the utterance containing the marker. Moreover, it is argued that this poly-procedural constraint is rhetorically exploited by the speaker in the interest of convincing argumentation.

Keywords: discourse markers, procedural meaning, relevance theory, rhetoric, non-truth-conditional meaning, mutual manifestness
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Rhetorical afu and its co-textual varieties
  • 3. Afu: Some preliminary remarks
    • 3.1Epistemic and backgrounding functions
  • 4.Relevance theory
    • 4.1Mutual cognitive environment
    • 4.2Discourse markers and procedural meaning
  • 5.Rhetorical afu: A procedural marker
    • 5.1 Afu’s dual constraint on implicitly communicated content
    • 5.2The rhetorical use of afu
    • 5.3A parsimonious account of rhetorical afu
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 February 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.19021.bar
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