The importance of discourse markers (words like '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 being 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 dominated 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.

A study of the analysis of discourse markers (words like 'so', 'however', and 'well').

About the Author
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 pragmatics in publications including Journal of Linguistics, Lingua, Pragmatics and Cognition, and Linguistics and Philosophy.

Reviews
'Relevance and Linguistic Meaning raises a number of interesting and important issues ... it is a well-structured and accessibly written book ...'. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia



Book Information
ISBN 9780521607711
Author Diane Blakemore
Format Paperback
Page Count 212
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 320g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 12mm