A relevance-focused production heuristic

Park, Kyu Hyun and Clark, Billy (2022) A relevance-focused production heuristic. Journal of Pragmatics, 187. pp. 176-185. ISSN 0378-2166

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Abstract

This paper proposes that a relevance-focused production heuristic plays a role in the production of communicative acts. The relevance-theoretic account of communication and other pragmatic theories focus on both communicators and their addressees, but there has been more focus on the pragmatic processes of comprehension than on communication, with few specific suggestions about the role of pragmatic processes in production. This paper outlines a research programme which aims to build on work by other researchers by making a proposal about this. The central claim is that production is constrained by at least one dedicated heuristic, which shares some properties with the relevance-guided comprehension heuristic proposed in earlier work. The main aim of the paper is to consider some questions about the nature of this heuristic and to propose an initial characterisation. The production of communicative acts is extremely complex. Our claim is that a production heuristic is one of many factors involved in this and that this proposal can help contribute to accounts of communicative behaviour.

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