Experimental pragmatics: Towards testing relevance-based predictions about anaphoric bridging inferences

Abstract

Critics of relevance theory have charged that relevance theory provides no testable predictions, hence is unfalsifiable. This paper is an attempt to identify some testable relevance-theoretic predictions about anaphoric bridging inferences, and to show possible ways of testing these predictions. A relevance-based model of utterance interpretation is compared with Levinson’s GCI model, and their contrasting views on how to divide explicitly communicated content and implicitly communicated content of utterance are discussed. Moreover, predictions following each theory about derivation of bridging inferences are compared before possible ways to test these predictions are suggested.