This chapter provides an overview of studies that call on the syntactic features of connectives as a means to disambiguate their function and meaning. These syntactic features cover the morphosyntactic nature of discourse connectives as well as their syntagmatic distribution. On the basis of existing lexicons of discourse connectives, we first give an overview of the morphosyntactic distribution of discourse connectives in several European and non-European languages. We then address a number of studies that focus on the (semi-automatic) identification and annotation of discourse connectives in context. This is of particular interest in the field of natural language processing, but also in the field of contrastive linguistics, where it has been shown that syntactic categories, including those underlying the description of discourse connective uses, are not always cross-linguistically valid. The final section is devoted to the relationship between the syntagmatic position of discourse connectives and their meaning, which has given rise to numerous studies at the grammar-discourse interface highlighting the fuzzy boundary between discourse connectives and discourse markers.

In this chapter, we first sketch a number of assumptions underlying diachronic research in order to understand how researchers sketch the emergence of discourse connectives (and discourse markers) in language. We then review the discussion about the theoretical framework underlying the diachronic evolution of discourse connectives, that is, in which conceptual terms this linguistic process is best accounted for, grammaticalization or pragmaticalization. We then turn to a general description of the evolution from clause combining strategies to coordinating and subordinating connectives. Different case studies are presented in order to illustrate typical and less typical cases of language change in the area of connectives: the semantic evolution from temporal meaning to concessive meaning of French cependant (‘yet’), the peculiar semantic evolution from cause to contrast of Italian però (‘but’) (5.3.2), and a diachronic account of the synchronic polysemy of French alors.

Given the fact that in humans the communication of information about emotional states is ubiquitous, people might be forgiven for assuming that pragmatic accounts of linguistic communication would include quite well-developed views of not only the role of emotion in inference, but also how information about emotional states is communicated. However, for a range of reasons, those working in pragmatics have tended to persist with the view that the mental processes behind reason and passions exist in somehow separate domains. As a result, the emotional dimension to linguistic communication has tended to play very much a subordinate role to the rational or cognitive one. Indeed, in many accounts it plays no role at all. This chapter provides an overview of the issues discussed in the book. These all point towards our principal motivation: our belief that emotional or expressive meaning, along with other affect-related, ineffable dimensions of communication, play such a huge role in human interaction that any pragmatic theory worth its salt must account for them.

Linguists, philosophers and pragmatists have tended to stay close to those areas of meaning illuminated by semantics and logic. In this chapter we suggest that relevance theory offers a solution to this limiting view. We say a little about the context in which the framework was devised, present the main tenets of the theory itself and then explain the two theoretical advances which form the basis of our belief that it is uniquely positioned to accommodate the communication of affect and emotion. The first of these is the notion of non-conceptual or procedural meaning. The second involves two key innovations in relevance theory which result in theoretical divergences from post-Gricean and Neo-Gricean approaches. In the first of these, the relevance-theoretic informative intention is not characterised as an intention to modify the hearer’s thoughts directly. In the second, relevance theory does not attempt to draw the line Grice drew between showing and meaningNN and recognises both as instances of overt intentional communication. These two innovations result in the theory’s being able to accommodate extremely vague types of communication and, further, demonstrate that communicated information - whether clock-like or cloud-like - can be shown rather than merely meantNN.

Chapter 7 broadens the discussion by exploring pragmatics and emotion from an evolutionary perspective (see Cornell and Wharton 2021). We suggest that in modern-day humans, two systems of processing and communication co-exist: one evolutionarily ancient and to which affective effects are more closely related, the other evolutionarily more recent, and in which conceptual, propositional processes - and cognitive effects - tend to dominate. We illustrate how two such systems work with reference to an underexplored paper by Paul Grice in which he outlines his ‘creature-construction’ thought experiment. One of the main claims of this book is that in focusing exclusively on propositional inference, the low, fast route has been ignored. The existence of these two routes might shed light on how the emotional vigilance presented in Dezecache et al. (2013) may make use of both the specialised inferential and coding-decoding mechanisms and may even represent a precursor to those strategies that underlie epistemic vigilance.

We conclude our book with brief summaries of our responses to the challenges we outlined in Chapter 2. We argue that the account we offer here shows promise and that the evidence is clear that, of all theories of utterance interpretation, relevance theory is uniquely positioned to accommodate emotion and affect.

This chapter begins with more historical discussion, in which we sketch the prehistory of the study of the pragmatics and trace a route in the development of expressive meaning from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Following an expression coined by Nerlich and Clark, we use the term ‘proto-pragmatics’ to refer to those thinkers who were the first to take the role of context and emotion in language use seriously. The point of so doing is to show that our attempt to introduce affect into the centre of theories of utterance interpretation is actually an act of reintroduction, rather than an original move. The sidelining of affect by theories of communication has not happened in the absence of opposition. We also suggest parallels between the work of Charles Bally of the Geneva school and the work of those involved in the so-called ‘Ordinary Language Approach to Philosophy’ going on in the 1940s at Oxford, whose adherents committed themselves to the study of natural language use rather than the logical formulae of formal languages