The semantics and pragmatics of misrepresentation in English - a relevance-theoretic approach

This thesis deals with the nature of metarepresentation in language. It proposes \nlinguistic-semantic and pragmatic analyses of a variety of metarepresentational \nexpressions in English, using the framework of relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson \n1986/1995). The main aim is to deepen the relevance-theoretic analysis of \nmetarepresentation, to apply it to a range of data which have not been previously \nanalysed in this framework, and to compare the resulting account with alternative \nsemantic and pragmatic accounts. \nChapter 1 looks at various types of quotation (including mention, reported \nspeech and thought, and mixed quotation) and surveys some of the problems \nencountered by traditional and more recent alternative accounts; the chief problem \nbeing that they either do not acknowledge the range and variety of semantic \nindeterminacies in quotation, or do not provide an adequate account of how these \nindeterminacies are resolved during utterance comprehension. Chapter 2 introduces \nrelevance theory and shows how the comprehension strategy it provides can be used \nto resolve the various indeterminacies in quotation. It also shows how the relevance-theoretic \nnotion of metarepresentation (representation by resemblance) can be applied \nnot only to paradigmatic cases of direct and indirect quotation, but also to a range of \nother cases involving the exploitation of linguistic or conceptual resemblances. What \nis common to all these cases is that a representation is used with a guarantee of \nfaithfulness to some other representation, rather than truthfulness to some state of \naffairs. The claim that a metarepresentation can be faithful enough without being \nidentical to the original is illustrated and explored. \nThe remaining chapters extend the analysis to more complex and \ncontroversial cases. Chapter 3 looks at previous accounts of metalinguistic negation, \nand develops a relevance-theoretic account whose linguistic-semantic and pragmatic \nproperties are investigated and compared with previous relevance-theoretic accounts. \nChapter 4 looks at previous treatments of echo questions, both inside and outside \nrelevance theory and extends the relevance-theoretic analysis to deal with some \nstandard and non-standard types of echoic question. Chapter 5 deals with a variety of \nmetarepresentational conditionals, and develops a relevance-theoretic account, \ncomparing it with previous accounts. My conclusion is that the relevance-theoretic \napproach can yield analyses that are better justified than previous accounts on both \ndescriptive and explanatory grounds.