Table of Contents

Part I. Overview: 1. A first outline; 2. Origins and alternatives: Grice, relevance theory and modern pragmatics; 3. Principles of relevance; 4. Explaining inferences; Part II. Details and Developments: 5. Explicature and implicature; 6. Types of explicature; 7. Types of implicature; 8. Lexical pragmatics; 9. Figurative language: metaphor; 10. Figurative language: irony; 11. Linguistic semantics; 12. Conclusion: applications and recent developments; Appendix: key notions of relevance theory.

Promotional Information

The definitive introduction to relevance theory, starting from the basics and covering all its key ideas.

About the Author

Billy Clark is a senior lecturer in English Language in the Department of Media at Middlesex University. He has considerable experience teaching relevance theory at undergraduate and postgraduate level and was editor of the 'Foundations of Linguistics' section for the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics edited by Keith Brown.

Reviews

'A beautifully clear, insightful and entertaining overview of relevance theory, which takes readers from first principles to recent developments in a warm, witty and fair-minded way. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in how communication works.' Deirdre Wilson, University College London