Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Bush joke

This post is not directly related to relevance theory, but it does contain a good joke. In a previous version of this post, I broke with scholarly neutrality for these reasons. It would have made a considerable difference, and it's difficult to keep quiet about these things and stick to academic work when you are wondering if war or the destruction of the environment will end human civilisation first.

From William Gibson's blog:
President Bush goes to an elementary school to talk about the war.
After his talk, he offers to answer questions. One little boy puts up his hand and the president asks him his name.
"I'm Billy, sir."
"And what's your question, Billy?"
"I have three questions, sir. Why did the US invade Iraq without the support of the UN? Why are you President when Al Gore got more votes? And whatever happened to Osama Bin Laden?"
Just then the bell rings for recess. Bush announces that they'll continue after recess.
When they return, Bush asks, "OK, where were we? Question time! Who has a question?"
Another little boy raises his hand. The president asks his name.
"I'm Steve, sir."
"And what's your question, Steve?"
"I have five questions, sir. Why did the US invade Iraq without the support of the UN? Why are you President when Al Gore got more votes? Whatever happened to Osama Bin Laden? Why did the recess bell go off twenty minutes early? And what the heck happened to Billy?"

If you want overtly political stuff, go to my other blog. I'll keep politics out of this one from now on.

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

New papers relevant to relevance

Here are the latest additions to the online RT bibliography, courtesy of Franscisco Yus' posting to the relevance mailing list.
Andone, C. 2003) "Argumentative values of but in the discourse of economics." British and American Studies (Revista de Studii Britanice si Americane) 9: 211-218.

Escuder, A. (1996) "Relevance and translation in writing about environment." Georgica 4: 335-344.

Figueras Solanilla, C. (2002) "La jerarquia de la accesibilidad de las expresiones referenciales en español." Revista Española de Lingüística 32(1): 53-96.

Goerling, F. (1996) "Relevance and transculturation." Notes on Translation 10(3): 49-57.

Gutt, E.-A. (forthcoming) "Relevance-theoretic approaches to translation." In: Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd edition). Ed. K. Brown. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Kempf, S. (2000) "Who told the truth?" Notes on Translation 14(1): 34-46.

Meunier, J.-P. (1994) "Quelques aspects de l'evolution des theories de la communication: De la signification a la cognition." Degres 79-80: k1-k16.

Moeschler, J. (2004) "Intercultural pragmatics: A cognitive approach." Intercultural Pragmatics 1(1): 49-70.
http://www.degruyter.de/journals/intcultpragm/pdf/1_49.pdf

Murillo, S. (2004) "A relevance reassessment of reformulation markers." Journal of Pragmatics 36(11): 2059-2068.
(updated reference)

Pilkington, A. (2001) "Non-lexicalised concepts and degrees of effability: Poetic thoughts and the attraction of what is not in the dictionary." Belgian journal of Linguistics 15: 1-10.

Ram, A. (1990) "Knowledge goals: A theory of interestingness." In: Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cambridge, MA, August.
Available here

Recanati, F. (2003b) "Embedded implicatures." Philosophical Perspectives 17(1): 299-332.
Adobe Acrobat format:
http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~schlenke/Recanati-Embedded.pdf
Rich Text format:
Available here

Schank, R.C. (1979) "Interestingness: Controlling inferences." Artificial Intelligence 12: 273-297.

Silva, F.-A. (1996) "Lancando anzois: Uma analise cognitiva de processos mentais em traduçao." Revista de Estudos da Linguagem (RevEL) 4(2): 71-90.

Storto, L. (2004)  "Review of F. Recanati's Literal Meaning." The Linguist List 15.2535, 11-9-2004.
http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2535.html

Yus, F. (forthcoming) "Relevance theory." In: Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd edition). Ed. K. Brown. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Ziv, Y. (1996b) "Pronominal reference to inferred antecedents." Belgian Journal of Linguistics 10: 55-67..