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This chapter attempts to make sense of the character of legal interpretation and to assess some of the many claims about how legal interpretation does or should proceed. It sketches a cognitively realistic approach to legal interpretation, which seeks to understand such interpretation as a ‘triadic’ process that relates a text to its author or authors, on the one hand, and its interpreter or interpreters, on the other; and which reveals the cognitive tasks that legal interpreters perform in arriving at conclusions about a legal text in the legal context. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 1 identifies some live issues in legal interpretation: the gap between high-level principles and decisions on the ground, and the lack of any clear articulation of how legal interpretation actually works at the level of cognitive process. Section 2 spells out the Relevance Theory framework and its implications for legal interpretation. Section 3 explores the features of legal interpretation by briefly comparing them to those of ‘ordinary’ communication and literary interpretation, and then returns to some of the problems in legal interpretation touched on earlier. Section 4 presents some brief conclusions about the approach to legal interpretation that the chapter has offered.

This chapter provides the theoretical background to the study. Based on the two major theories behind the analysis — Dynamic Syntax and Relevance Theory — it develops a formal model of utterance interpretation which assumes that 1) linguistic knowledge is directly reflected in the linguistic abilities of speaking and understanding; and that 2) a formal model of linguistic understanding can be developed independently of production. The description of this model includes a detailed discussion of Dynamic Syntax and Relevance Theory and addresses also the role of phonology and the lexicon in the model. The second part of the chapter gives an introduction into the formal tools of Dynamic Syntax which will be employed in the following chapters.

This chapter considers a range of frameworks with a different conception of the general rational inference that underlies implicature—a conception that appeals to speakers’ psychology. One such approach is Relevance Theory, which is based on the psychology of interpretation. For Relevance Theory, speakers’ contributions to conversation go beyond conventional semantics because of the reasoning hearers inevitably use to connect events to what matters to them. Another approach, epitomized by the work of Pinker and colleagues, starts from the psychology of decision-making. This approach argues that pragmatic meaning can amplify semantics because hearers understand the strategies that speakers have actually used in formulating utterances. The chapter emphasizes the contrasts between these approaches and Grice's, particularly in the status of implicated meaning and in the possibility of flouting interpretive principles, and concludes that the psychological theories cannot sustain Grice’s conception of the relationship between semantics and pragmatics.

This chapter is concerned with the interpretation of underspecified verbs. It shows that standard model-theoretic approaches cannot be extended to this dynamic view of verbs since they presuppose a static notion of semantic arity which is specified in advance in the model against which the sentence is evaluated. This is demonstrated by discussing two approaches to the semantics of adjuncts (based on Dowty 1979 and McConnell-Ginet 1982). The chapter then introduces the notions of mental representation and pragmatic enrichment, and argues against this background that a proper understanding of underspecified verbs, and hence VP adjunction, can better be attained by a pragmatic analysis of verb phrase interpretation. Under this view verbs address mental concepts only indirectly, and the eventual, communicated concept is constructed in an ad hoc fashion in the utterance context with recourse to the pragmatic principle of relevance. The interpretation of verbs is thus seen in parallel to other processes of meaning construction, including non-literal meaning (cf. Carston 1996). Furthermore, since the eventual valency of a verb results from its meaning in context, it can equally only be determined with recourse to pragmatic knowledge. In other words, the establishment of basic predicate-argument structure is subject to pragmatic constraints on meaning construction. A result of this view is that there is no well-defined syntactic level of logical form as an interface between syntax and pragmatics, since the establishment of VPs — syntactic structures — presupposes the application of non-syntactic, pragmatic knowledge.

This chapter considers the translation of humor. Several approaches to humor translation are considered, including the faithfulness approach, functional translation, Zabalbeascoa’s priority scales and solution types, Eco’s translation as negotiation, Skopos theory, and Relevance theory. Translation of particular types of texts is also addressed including audio-visual translation (dubbing subtitling, and interpreting humor) and puns.

Our exposition is framed around two questions: What interpretive effects can linguistic utterances have? What causes those effects? Lepore and Stone make an empirical case that some effects are contributions to the public record of a conversation determined by linguistic conventions—following Lewis—while non-contributions (our term) produced by imagination offer no determinate content—following Davidson. They thereby replace the old semantics–pragmatics divide by eliminating conversational implicature altogether. We critique Lepore and Stone’s position on empirical grounds, presenting cases in which contributions are made non-conventionally. We also critique their view methodologically, presenting a dilemma by which they either cannot handle many cases using their framework or they do so in an ad hoc fashion. We conclude by suggesting Relevance Theory as an alternative that follows Lepore and Stone’s purported methodology and handles many of their empirical cases.

This chapter focuses on the common processing mechanisms of literal, metaphorical and loose talk. It is argued that the processing involved is inferential because it is always context-dependent. Analyses demonstrate that language production and comprehension is always context-dependent and that the tighter the world that interlocutors jointly inhabit, the looser their talk can afford to be. Sperber and Wilson’s relevance-theoretic approach is adopted as the primary analytic device. Relevance theory construes all verbal communication as governed by a principle of relevance and not the conventional construal of governance by maxim, rule or convention of truthfulness. Analyses suggest that all verbal communication is a transcranial achievement.