Maria Jodłowiec

The main goal of this paper is to argue that the way explicitly communicated content is approached in leading pragmatic theories is flawed, since it is posited that explicature generation involves pragmatic enrichment of the decoded logical form of the utterance to full propositionality. This kind of enhancement postulated to underlie explicature generation appears to be theoretically inadequate and not to correspond to the psychological reality of utterance interpretation. Drawing on earlier critique of extant pragmatic positions on explicatures, mainly by Borg (2016) and Jary (2016), I add further arguments against modelling explicitly communicated import in the way leading verbal communication frameworks do. It is emphasized that the cognitively plausible theory of communicated meaning is compromised at the cost of theory-internal concerns.

Indeterminacy of meaning, which has to do with vagueness of the underlying speaker’s intention, is a pervasive phenomenon in human communication, but researchers hardly ever address the issue, as it is notoriously difficult to account for. The relevance-theoretic notion of weak communication offers a viable explanation of how this phenomenon can be approached. This paper argues that weak communication and its satellite, that is, poetic effects, prove particularly useful to account for how aphorisms work. The focus is on showing that the process of aphorism comprehension, underlain by meaning indeterminacy, and certain intrinsic characteristics of the genre find a reasonable and comprehensive explanation when looked at through the lens of Relevance Theory.

The paper offers an analysis of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the production and comprehension of verbal jokes in terms of what relevance theorists refer to as weakly communicated import. While pragmatic analyses of humour emphasize the role of the inferential stages that the audience is intended (or even manipulated, Yus 2016) to go through in processing a joke, the weak communication model presented here focuses on the punch-line effect, exploring the nature of the “cognitive climax” that is created. On this account, a vast array of weakly communicated assumptions, resulting in a cognitive overload effect, rather than incongruity resolution on its own, is identified as the laughter-inducing mechanism underlying verbal humour. The central idea is that universal and culture-specific humour-generating elements in jokes have one quality in common, viz. their potential to cause a cognitive overload effect, which may, and often does, result in amusement. On this approach, what is typically recognized as national or ethnic humour is posited to recruit the same humour-invoking pragmatic mechanisms as in other kinds of jokes, the principal difference lying in the choice of the target being mocked, which must be well-known to the audience for the cognitive overload effect to be brought forth.