Meaning and Relevance

Meaning and Relevance PDF Author: Deirdre Wilson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052176677X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is a process of inference guided by precise expectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics and the thoughts that humans are capable of entertaining and conveying? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations, metaphors and ironies? Is the ability to understand speakers' meanings rooted in a more general human ability to understand other minds? How do these abilities interact in evolution and in cognitive development? Meaning and Relevance sets out to answer these and other questions, enriching and updating relevance theory and exploring its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies.

Meaning and Relevance

Meaning and Relevance PDF Author: Deirdre Wilson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052176677X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is a process of inference guided by precise expectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics and the thoughts that humans are capable of entertaining and conveying? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations, metaphors and ironies? Is the ability to understand speakers' meanings rooted in a more general human ability to understand other minds? How do these abilities interact in evolution and in cognitive development? Meaning and Relevance sets out to answer these and other questions, enriching and updating relevance theory and exploring its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies.

Relevance and Linguistic Meaning

Relevance and Linguistic Meaning PDF Author: Diane Blakemore
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139437305
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
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.

The Art of Relevance

The Art of Relevance PDF Author: Nina Simon
Publisher: Museum 2.0
ISBN: 9780692701492
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
What do the London Science Museum, California Shakespeare Theater, and ShaNaNa have in common? They are all fighting for relevance in an often indifferent world. The Art of Relevance is your guide to mattering more to more people. You'll find inspiring examples, rags-to-relevance case studies, research-based frameworks, and practical advice on how your work can be more vital to your community. Whether you work in museums or libraries, parks or theaters, churches or afterschool programs, relevance can work for you. Break through shallow connection. Unlock meaning for yourself and others. Find true relevance and shine.

The Notion of Relevance in Information Science

The Notion of Relevance in Information Science PDF Author: Tefko Saracevic
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031023021
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 109

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Book Description
Everybody knows what relevance is. It is a "ya'know" notion, concept, idea–no need to explain whatsoever. Searching for relevant information using information technology (IT) became a ubiquitous activity in contemporary information society. Relevant information means information that pertains to the matter or problem at hand—it is directly connected with effective communication. The purpose of this book is to trace the evolution and with it the history of thinking and research on relevance in information science and related fields from the human point of view. The objective is to synthesize what we have learned about relevance in several decades of investigation about the notion in information science. This book deals with how people deal with relevance—it does not cover how systems deal with relevance; it does not deal with algorithms. Spurred by advances in information retrieval (IR) and information systems of various kinds in handling of relevance, a number of basic questions are raised: But what is relevance to start with? What are some of its properties and manifestations? How do people treat relevance? What affects relevance assessments? What are the effects of inconsistent human relevance judgments on tests of relative performance of different IR algorithms or approaches? These general questions are discussed in detail.

Digital Relevance

Digital Relevance PDF Author: A. Albee
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137452811
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Digital Relevance teaches readers the knowledge, strategies, and skills need to create content, instantly engage customers, and compel them to action by sharing ideas so seamlessly matched to each audience's context that they can't help but take next steps toward purchase.

Linguistic Meaning, Truth Conditions and Relevance

Linguistic Meaning, Truth Conditions and Relevance PDF Author: C. Iten
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230503233
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
The main argument of this book is that the notion of truth plays no role in speaker-hearers' interpretation of linguistic utterances and that it is not needed for theoretical accounts of linguistic meaning either. The theoretical argument is developed in the first part, while the second part supports it with cognitive relevance-theoretic, rather than truth-based, analyses of the 'concessive' expressions but, although and even if .

Relevance Theory

Relevance Theory PDF Author: Billy Clark
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521878209
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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

Meaning and Use

Meaning and Use PDF Author: A. Margalit
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402041047
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
The second Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter was held in Jerusalem on April 25-28, 1976. The symposium was originally planned to celebrate the 60th birthday of Y ehoshua Bar-Hillel, philosopher and friend. But his sudden death intervened, and turned celebration into commemoration. The topic of the symposiumwas Meaning and Use. For Bar-Hillel, the question 'meaning or use?' was of great importance, one which he took as a question of priorities. Which approach to natural language is prior: the formal, semantical approach, which accords a central position to the truth functional concept of meaning and to the theory of reference, or rather the alternative approach which accords the central position to linguistic commu nication and prefers dealing with speech acts to dealing with Statements? Bar Hillel's answer to this question, in his later years, can be summed up by our title, meaning and use: neither approach deserves priority, each is equally necessary, and they both complement each other. Those familiar with Bar Hillel's uncompromising intellectual honesty would know that this answer does not reflect a superficial wish for domestic peace, but stems rather from deep and informed convictions. The issues of meaning and use dominated Bar-Hillel's intellectuallife. At the same time his day-to-day existence was guided by the idea that the meaning of life is to be found in being useful, particularly in being useful to the community of seekers of knowledge.

Apropos of Something

Apropos of Something PDF Author: Elisa Tamarkin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022645326X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
A history of the idea of “relevance” since the nineteenth century in art, criticism, philosophy, logic, and social thought. Before 1800 nothing was irrelevant. So argues Elisa Tamarkin’s sweeping meditation on a key shift in consciousness: the arrival of relevance as the means to grasp how something that was once disregarded, unvalued, or lost to us becomes interesting and important. When so much makes claims to our attention every day, how do we decide what is most valuable right now? Relevance, Tamarkin shows, was an Anglo-American concept, derived from a word meaning “to raise or to lift up again,” and also “to give relief.” It engaged major intellectual figures, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and pragmatists and philosophers—William James, Alain Locke, John Dewey, and Alfred North Whitehead—as well as a range of critics, phenomenologists, linguists, and sociologists. Relevance is a struggle for recognition, especially in the worlds of literature, art, and criticism. Poems and paintings in the nineteenth century could now be seen as pragmatic works that make relevance and make interest—that reveal versions of events that feel apropos of our lives the moment we turn to them. Vividly illustrated with paintings by Winslow Homer, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and others, Apropos of Something is a searching philosophical and poetic study of relevance—a concept calling for shifts in both attention and perceptions of importance with enormous social stakes. It remains an invitation for the humanities and for all of us who feel tasked every day with finding the point.

Argument is War: Relevance-Theoretic Comprehension of the Conceptual Metaphor of War in the Apocalypse

Argument is War: Relevance-Theoretic Comprehension of the Conceptual Metaphor of War in the Apocalypse PDF Author: Clifford Winters
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004435778
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
In Revelation’s history, scholars have always assumed God’s violence was judgment. In Argument is War, however, Clifford T. Winters demonstrates that the “war” is using a conceptual metaphor to envision the restoration of Israel and, through them, the whole world.