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Relevance and Linguistic Meaning
The importance of discourse markers (words such as ‘so’, ‘however’ and ‘well’)
lies in the theoretical questions they raise about the nature of discourse and
the relationship between linguistic meaning and context. They are regarded
as central to semantics because they raise problems for standard theories of
meaning, and to pragmatics because they seem to play a role in the way
discourse is understood. In this new and important study, Diane Blakemore
argues that attempts to analyse these expressions within standard semantic
frameworks raise even more problems, while their analysis as expressions that
link segments of discourse has led to an unproductive and confusing exercise
in classification. She concludes that the exercise in classification that has dom-
inated discourse marker research should be replaced by the investigation of
the way in which linguistic expressions contribute to the inferential processes
involved in utterance understanding.
DIANE BLAKEMORE is Professor of Linguistics at the European Studies
Research Institute and School of Languages, University of Salford. She is
the author of Semantic Constraints on Relevance (1987) and Understanding
Utterances (1992), as well as a range of articles in relevance-theoretic pragmat-
ics in publications including Journal of Linguistics, Lingua, Pragmatics and
Cognition and Linguistics and Philosophy.
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN LINGUISTICS
General Editors: P . AUSTIN, J . BRESNAN, B . COMRIE, W . DRESSLER,
C . J . EWEN, R . LASS, D . LIGHTFOOT, I . ROBERTS, S . ROMAINE, N . V . SMITH
In this series
62 STEPHEN R. ANDERSON: A-Morphous morphology
63 LESLEY STIRLING: Switch reference and discourse representation
64 HENK J. VERKUYL: Atheory of aspectuality: the interaction between temporal and
atemporal structure
65 EVE V. CLARK: The lexicon in acquisition
66 ANTHONY R. WARNER: English auxiliaries: structure and history
67 P .