Pragmatic Understanding of Linguistic Landscape: A Relevance-Theoretic Perspective

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study aims to decipher linguistic landscape from a relevance-theoretic perspective in the hope of further broadening the exploration of linguistic landscape research. Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995) is incorporated to answer three questions: (1) Why do viewers focus on linguistic landscape? (2) What is the cognitive mechanism when viewers noticing linguistic landscape? (3) How do viewers identify the intended meanings of linguistic landscape? The analysis uncovers that attention paid to linguistic landscape is on the grounds that it is an input relevant to the mentally represented assumptions of the addressers and exerts a “positive cognitive effect” (Sperber & Wilson 1995, §3.1–2) in a context which may strengthen, revise or yield implications of an existing assumption on one hand. On the other hand, in light of optimal relevance, the relevance-guided comprehension heuristic can be utilized by the viewers as a sound approach to identify the communicator's meaning of linguistic landscape.

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