últimas corrientes teóricas en los estudios de traducción - Gredos ...

HASSANE LOUNIS–RELEVANCE THEORY: HOW USEFUL IS IT TO TRANSLATING DISCOURSE CONNECTIVES?
RELEVANCE THEORY: HOW USEFUL IS IT TO TRANSLATING
DISCOURSE CONNECTIVES?
INTRODUCTION
HASSANE LOUNIS
The European Studies Research Institute, University of Salford, UK
Until recent years, arguably until early eighties, the study of discourse connectives
(henceforth DCs) has not been popular. Then, a number of prominent studies on the
subject opened the way for new visions, provided the foundation ground and indeed
encouraged, established and student researchers alike, to learn about how to make our
communication run smoother and clearer and, most importantly, make it less ambiguous.
At present, there tend to be two main theoretical frameworks followed in the study
of DCs: the coherence/cohesion-based model and relevance theory (henceforth RT)-based
one. Some researchers such as Blakemore (1987), Blass (1985) and Rouchota (1992) discuss
the issue of which one of the two theoretical frameworks is more viable and more reliable
at length and therefore the present paper will not go in depth on the matter. It is perhaps
worth mentioning that their reservations about coherence/cohesion approach to study
DCs is based on the simple fact that cohesion/coherence do not play a vital role in the
interpretation of utterances. According to Blakemore (2001) the disparity between both
views is that
relevance theory argues that coherence is a consequence of the way we
understand utterances and more particularly, of our search for relevance, the coherence
approach argues that it is the search for coherence that leads to the successful
comprehension of utterances.
The roles DCs have in maintaining different spheres of a discourse, as supporters
of the cohesion/coherence approach claim, is something which needs to be looked at
again.
[…] [T]he way hearers recover messages from utterances is governed by their
assumption that in discourse, contiguous linguistic strings are meant to be interpreted as
being connected, or . . . that discourse is coherent
is not a fully correct assumption Blakemore (1987:105) says. What lacks this
assumption, she continues, is the understanding that the hearer should participate in the
communication process through his/her knowledge of the context (knowledge of the
world 1 ).
An alternative, then, is required. RT views different pragmatic/semantic issues
from a different angle and studies carried out on the basis of this framework seem to
provide the much-needed tool to all language users.
1 In RT the notion “context” does not merely mean “all the elements associated to a given text” but it also
includes our entire knowledge and previous experiences which might help us recover a message. It is also referred to as
cognitive environment (cf. Sperber and Wilson 1986:39)
388