The concepts of the Relevance Theory and its application to the study of discursive markers

Abstract

This paper presents the fundamental ideas of the Relevance theory and its contribution to the study of discourse markers, with particular interest in issues related to the use of these units in Spanish and Serbian. With this purpose in mind, we adopt the descriptive and analytical approach, structuring the paper as follows: the introduction presents a brief overview of different schools and tendencies in the study of markers; the next two sections (2 and 3) expose Grice’s model of communication and define the main concepts of the Relevance theory: the ostensive-inferential aspect of the human communication, the notion of relevance conceived as a universal cognitive principle that directs the communicative and interpretative activity and the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning. Once we have presented the theoretical framework, we continue by describing grammatical and semantic-functional properties of discourse markers (section 4). The analysis is performed on a corpus composed of different texts (journalistic and literary), however, given the great number of markers and the diversity of their meaning, the analysis is limited to the semantic and pragmatic values of the adversative connectives, as well as their equivalent forms in Serbian.