About this Research Topic
Work within the relevance-theoretic framework has tended to be published in journals devoted to linguistics, pragmatics and philosophy. But the possibilities for relevance theory extends well beyond these relatively narrow confines. The discipline of pragmatics occupies a unique position, situated as it is at the confluence of a number of different, yet related, subject areas; as such those working in relevance-theoretic pragmatics are uniquely positioned to look outwards to other disciplines. After all, the processes of utterance interpretation and communication, which pragmatics aims to describe and explain, are at the heart of nearly all human endeavours.
This Frontiers Research Topic has two main goals: firstly, to push the envelope of the theory with particular attention to its implications for psychology and cognitive science (and, in so doing, explore further its power and potential from both cross-disciplinary and pragmatic perspectives); secondly, to disseminate the theory more widely, and encourage others to engage with the theory and better understand its capacity to broaden and deepen our understanding of all aspects of communication and cognition.
The scope of this Research Topic is broadly defined by the following themes (note, we are particularly interested in work which tests experimentally theoretical predictions):
1. Work involving the application of relevance theory in psychology and cognitive science
2. Cross-disciplinary work involving the application of relevance-theoretic insights to other domains (or insights from other domains to relevance theory)
3. Work in pragmatics which questions and revises existing relevance theoretic analyses
4. Work in pragmatics which seeks to extend the boundaries of relevance theory from within
With these themes in mind, we are interested in the following types of manuscripts.
• Original research
• Systematic reviews
• Reviews and mini-reviews
• Perspectives
• Conceptual analyses
Keywords: cognition, communication, inference, pragmatics, relevance
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.