Implicit temporality from the perspective of relevance theory

Abstract

The article presents an attempt to apply the basic principles of Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson’s Relevance theory to the study of implicit means of time reference. The theory combines both cognitive and pragmatic features, which makes it suitable for online analysis of the natural communicative process including the possible mistakes in the cognitive mechanism of inference. The article contains an overview of the main aspects of Relevance theory exemplified by contexts with implicit temporality. The preliminary classification of implicit means of temporal location of an action, which includes lexical, grammatical and contextual implicit means, is also provided. The article also provides analysis of the addressee’s perception of implicit time information in accordance with its relevance. The article also dwells on the problem of how a person decides that an utterance is of informative and cognitive value (that is relevant) and hence must be processed. Besides, the author looks into the factors that affect the relevance of an utterance (for instance its broad communicative context, by which we understand both communicants’ background knowledge about the language, the situation of communication and the world) and cites situations in which informative relevance decreases resulting in mistakes in information processing and the addressor’s informative and communicative failures. The author also attempts to demonstrate the prospects of further integration of the conceptual framework of Relevance theory and other cognitive and pragmatic linguistic theories, the theory of presuppositions and mental spaces in particular. Besides, the author looks into the terminological inexactitude of such notions as ‘implicature’ (implication) and ‘explicature’ and also suggests considering the application of weak implicatures to the analysis of inferential mistakes.