Relevance and Linguistic Meaning

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. Diane Blakemore asserts 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.

• As well as providing a framework for the analysis of discourse markers, the book addresses broader theoretical issues in semantics and pragmatics
• Builds on and improves on a framework that has been used for the analysis of discourse markers in a variety of languages
• After Sperber & Wilson, author is the foremost Relevance theorist in the world and one of the leading pragmatists on the international scene