Relevance Theory and Proverbs: Exploring Context through Explicatures and Implicatures

Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995) is a theory of communication which states that the human brain is geared towards processing relevant stimuli for little effort. While proponents of Relevance Theory have endeavored to explain various linguistic phenomena such as metaphor, irony, sarcasm, and idioms, there has been little work done on the proverb. The current thesis fills in this gap within Relevance Theory by applying Relevance-Theoretic principles to the interpretation of proverbs in context. This study explains how proverb meaning carries both a base meaning as well as an implicated meaning in context, with the use of Relevance Theory’s explicatures and implicatures. In addition, this thesis makes use of ad hoc concept formation (Wilson & Carston 2007) to account for meaning modulation and contrasts the analysis of proverbs under Relevance Theory with Vega-Moreno’s (2003) analysis of idioms under Relevance Theory.