According to a number of researchers in linguistics and artificial intelligence, the key to the meanings of expressions such as in other words, that is, and for example/for instance lies in the particular coherence relations they express in discourse. It is argued that these relations are sub-types of the relation of Elaboration and hence are ideational or semantic relations which express some experience of the world about us and within our imagination. In this paper I argue that the notion of Elaboration does not provide an adequate theoretical basis for the analysis of these expressions. I show, first, that their analysis in terms of ideational relations cannot capture the way in which utterances that contain them are understood, and, second, that the phenomena which are said to fall under the relation of Elaboration do not in fact constitute a single class. I show that Sperber and Wilson's (1986) relevance theoretic pragmatics provides a better explanatory framework for the analysis of these expressions, arguing that while their notion of interpretive resemblance plays a central role in the analysis of some utterances, there are other cases which must be analysed in terms of inferential relations between propositions. In all cases, the question of how the utterance is to be understood does not depend on the classification of the coherence relation it exhibits but on how it achieves relevance.
2017. Early Intervention at the Interface: Semantic-Pragmatic Strategies for Facilitating Conversation with Children with Developmental Disabilities. In Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line [Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, 11], ► pp. 163 ff.
Jary, Mark
2008. The relevance of complement choice: A corpus study of ‘believe’. Lingua 118:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Jasinskaja, Katja
2013. Corrective elaboration. Lingua 132 ► pp. 51 ff.
Marmorstein, Michal
2016. Getting to the point: The discourse marker yaʕni (lit. “it means”) in unplanned discourse in Cairene Arabic. Journal of Pragmatics 96 ► pp. 60 ff.
Marmorstein, Michal & Yael Maschler
2020. Stance-taking viaya′ani/ya′anu: A discourse marker in a Hebrew-Arabic language contact situation. Language in Society 49:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Matsui, Tomoko
2002. Semantics and pragmatics of a Japanese discourse marker dakara (so/in other words): a unitary account. Journal of Pragmatics 34:7 ► pp. 867 ff.
Mišković-Luković, Mirjana & Mirjana N. Dedaić
2012. The discourse marker odnosno at the ICTY: A case of disputed translation in war crime trials. Journal of Pragmatics 44:10 ► pp. 1355 ff.
Mišković-Luković, Mirjana, Mirjana N. Dedaić & Vladimir Polomac
2015. The meaning and interpretation of the Serbian discourse marker BRE. Journal of Pragmatics 87 ► pp. 18 ff.
Murillo, Silvia
2004. A relevance reassessment of reformulation markers. Journal of Pragmatics 36:11 ► pp. 2059 ff.
Na, Yoon-Hee
2023. Exploration of the Act of Exemplification in Research Article Introductions. Modern English Education 24:1 ► pp. 284 ff.
2016. Little Words: Communication and procedural meaning. Lingua 175-176 ► pp. 1 ff.
Triki, Nesrine
2021. Exemplification in research articles: Structural, semantic and metadiscursive properties across disciplines. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 54 ► pp. 101039 ff.
Unger, Christoph
2012. Procedural semantics, metarepresentation, and some particles in Behdini Kurdish. Lingua 122:14 ► pp. 1613 ff.
Ying, H.G.
2005. Second language learners’ interpretation of reflexive anaphora in VP-ellipsis: A relevance theory perspective. Language Sciences 27:5 ► pp. 551 ff.
Ying, Hongguang
2005. Relevance and L2 Learners’ Interpretation of Reflexive Anaphora in VP-Ellipsis: An Exploration of the Relationship between Relevance Theory and Typological Universals. Journal of Universal Language 6:1 ► pp. 159 ff.
Younis, Ramy, Daniel de Oliveira Fernandes, Pascal Gygax, Marcin Koszowy & Steve Oswald
2023. Rephrasing is not arguing, but it is still persuasive: An experimental approach to perlocutionary effects of rephrase. Journal of Pragmatics 210 ► pp. 12 ff.
[no author supplied]
2002. References. In Thoughts and Utterances, ► pp. 384 ff.
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