Overall, this special issue is to be situated within relevance-theoretic pragmatics (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995; Wilson and Sperber 2002, 2004, 2012), the cognitive framework that seeks to explain why, out of the various interpretations of an utterance which are compatible with what is encoded in its linguistic form, the hearer ends up selecting but just one of them and thinking that it is the interpretation that the speaker intends to communicate. However, in addition to showcasing some of relevance theorists’ current concerns, recent research, and latest developments, this special issue chiefly aims to celebrate the most valuable contribution to this framework and its subsequent evolution made by one of its proponents and founding scholars: Professor Deirdre Wilson. During her most fruitful and illuminating career, she has been an active member of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) and has been well known for her interest in a variety of pragmatics-related topics, which include procedural meaning, lexical pragmatics, figurative language, literary communication, non-propositional effects or metarepresentational abilities, to name but some.
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