Social Effects: a Relevance Theory Perspective

Abstract

[Abstract] Many linguists have claimed that interlocutors transmit social information about their identities or relationships when interacting (e.g. Lakoff, 1973; Laver, 1974, 1975; Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987; Scollon and Scollon, 1995; Coupland, 2000). However, they have not explained how this information is transmitted and recovered. Based on relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986, 1995; Wilson and Sperber, 2002), this paper argues that speakers transmit such social information implicitly and that hearers can recover it as a consequence of their expectations of relevance. The stylistic choices made by speakers can lead hearers to recover implicatures that they can use to obtain a specific type of cognitive effect referring to different aspects of the speakers’ personality or their relationship.