A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

Sperber 2004:611-612). In essence, you are able to infer that your guest (the person with
the empty glass) wants another drink because she provides just enough evidence of her
intention such that your processing effort was minimal and worth your time. Your
natural human tendency to search for relevance then allows you to infer what your
guest’s intention is. It is in this manner in which relevance theorists strive to characterize
discourse markers.
As Blakemore points out, relevance theorists are not interested in the behavior of
discourse markers (as Schiffrin and I are) in regards to their distribution or structure, but
rather in what kinds of meaning they encode and how their functions might be
pragmatically inferred by the search for relevance. For example, Blakemore argues in
regards to Schiffrin’s analysis for but that while but may be analyzed as functionally
marking the continuation of a turn at talk (i.e. continuing a speaker’s action), it is not
clear whether but, or any other discourse marker for that matter, actually encodes
information about turn taking (Blakemore 2004:236). In other words, Blakemore has
serious doubts whether but actually encodes a meaning of ‘turn taking’, or whether the
turn taking function can be inferred from the encoded meaning of but (whatever that may
be) taken together with the assumption that the speaker has been optionally relevant
(Blakemore quoting Wilson 1994b, Blakemore 2004:236).
What figures predominantly in RT is the idea that there are two types of linguistic
meaning, CONCEPTUAL or PROCEDURAL. When a linguistic construction (i.e. an
utterance) encodes conceptual representations (i.e. a concept, or what Schiffrin might
term as an idea unit) it is said to be conceptual. If an utterance encodes procedures for
manipulating those conceptual representations, it is said to be procedural. Therefore,
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