CONTEXT DYNAMICS 1: IS RELEVANCE SUBSCRIPTED ?

Year 2005, Issue: 009, 203 - 208, 15.12.2005

C. Aksoy

Abstract

It is generally assumed that a pragmatic proposition is formed by an utterance as relevant to some context. However, such assumptions may not yet be treated as scientific because operational definitions of the main concept "relevance" hardly exist, thus prone to circular definitions as "relevance of an utterance to a context exists whenever the utterance is relevant to the context", or "relevance exists whenever a relevance-theoretician says it exists" (to arrive at such inferences, please see [1], the book that marks the birth of the literary hypothesis of relevance). This theoretical vulnerability is probably due to the treatment of a context as invariant, and/or the belief that short-term memory can hold an infinite amount of propositions (some of which become inferences as a result of undefined procedures while some others remain as presuppositions), and/or the conception of an utterance as unitary and static following its onset in the hearer's mind, which is scientifically tolerable, because after listening to or reading out an utterance thoroughly and thinking about it for a period which an ordinary hearer/reader would unfortunately lack, the utterance could have a consolidated unitary episodic structure and the number of pertaining propositions could be easier to count, without the well-known limitations of short-term memory. Leaving such speculative and non-empirical deductions out of the discussion here, the utterance itself maybe considered as a token for context analysis by the hearer(s), as previously proposed [2, 3]; please also see [4]...

Keywords

CONTEXT DYNAMICS

CONTEXT DYNAMICS 1: IS RELEVANCE SUBSCRIPTED ?

Abstract

It is generally assumed that a pragmatic proposition is formed by an utterance as relevant to some context. However, such assumptions may not yet be treated as scientific because operational definitions of the main concept "relevance" hardly exist, thus prone to circular definitions as "relevance of an utterance to a context exists whenever the utterance is relevant to the context", or "relevance exists whenever a relevance-theoretician says it exists" (to arrive at such inferences, please see [1], the book that marks the birth of the literary hypothesis of relevance). This theoretical vulnerability is probably due to the treatment of a context as invariant, and/or the belief that short-term memory can hold an infinite amount of propositions (some of which become inferences as a result of undefined procedures while some others remain as presuppositions), and/or the conception of an utterance as unitary and static following its onset in the hearer's mind, which is scientifically tolerable, because after listening to or reading out an utterance thoroughly and thinking about it for a period which an ordinary hearer/reader would unfortunately lack, the utterance could have a consolidated unitary episodic structure and the number of pertaining propositions could be easier to count, without the well-known limitations of short-term memory. Leaving such speculative and non-empirical deductions out of the discussion here, the utterance itself maybe considered as a token for context analysis by the hearer(s), as previously proposed [2, 3]; please also see [4]...

Keywords

CONTEXT DYNAMICS

References

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