A Relevance-Theoretic Analysis of Explicature and Implicature in Juan Cole's Interview on Florida International University Interfaith Podcast

Zahraa Kareem Ghannam

Authors

Zahraa Kareem Ghannam University of Babylon, College of Management and Economics Department of Accounting

Keywords:

Relevance-Theory, Explicature, Implicature, Juan Cole

Abstract

This study offers a relevance-theoretic analysis of expicature and implicature in Juan Cole's a scholar specializing in Middle Eastern studies, interview on the FIU Interfaith Podcast, drawing on the framework developed by Wilson and Sperber. The study aims at Investigating how explicature and implicature interact in Juan Cole's discourse to shape the overall meaning. Showing the pragmatic strategies that the speaker employs to convey implicature. Examining how the interaction between explicature and implicature in the selected extracts guides the hearer's inferential process. It hypothesized that the interaction between explicature and implicature in Juan Cole's discourse is not incidental but systematically structured. The pragmatic strategies employed by the speaker to construct his implied meaning. Explicature provides the necessary interpretive foundation for implicature to be understood by the hearer without which implicated meaning cannot be derived. Overall the analysis of the extracts explicature and implicature did not occur in isolation or randomly occurring phenomena rather explicature constantly functioned as the propositional trigger for implicature, and implicature constantly qualified, elaborated, or reversed the assumptions generated by that explicature. Henceforth, Cole organizes his discourse according to a predictable explicature→implicature trajectory. Implicature did not arise independently, the hearer's ability to understand the implicated premises depend on first resolving reference, explicating and disambiguating expressions of the utterance. Henceforth, implicature depends on explicature, the two levels are figured in parallel as part of a single relevance stages rather than as successive stages.

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