Abstract
This chapter continues the journey through multimodal meaning dealing with pragmatics and how this discipline can contribute to the study of multimodal communication. In this context, literature on the relationship between multimodality and pragmatics is presented and discussed (Sect. 3.1) with particular reference to major pragmatic theories such as Grice’s theory of cooperativeness and Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory. This chapter also references and analyses pre-existing work on pragmatics and translation studies and investigates the connections with multimodal issues found in this literature (Sect. 3.2).
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Notes
- 1.
It must be acknowledged that the division between explicit and implicated meaning is not agreed upon by all pragmaticians: Bach’s contribution to this debate was to propose the idea of a third category of meaning falling between the two sides of the ‘pragmatic fence’, namely, the category of impliciture (1994). In Bach’s view, developments of the logical form of an utterance are not to be considered as part of either the explicit or the implicated meaning, falling somewhere in between: these elements of meaning are not uttered (and hence not said in a Gricean view), but at the same time, they do not contribute any additional proposition either, thus not qualifying fully as either explicit or implicit meaning.
- 2.
Leech (1983), for example, discusses maxims related to tact and politeness: debate about these additional maxims is still open, as the much more recent article by Pfister (2010) demonstrates.
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Dicerto, S. (2018). Multimodal Meaning in Context: Pragmatics. In: Multimodal Pragmatics and Translation. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69344-6_3
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