Relevance Theory and the Semantics of Non-declarative

Wilson and Sperber (1988a; Sperber and Wilson 1986) have proposed semantic analyses of declaratives, imperatives and interrogatives which are based on the notion of "a direct semantic link between linguistic form and representations of propositional attitude". They claim, however, that the various syntactic structures encode "procedural" rather than "conceptual" information. Rather than encoding concepts which appear in representations of propositional attitude (or what Sperber and Wilson call "higher-level explicatures") they convey information about how to proceed in recovering such representations. This thesis is an attempt to extend this analysis to some constructions which have not been explicitly discussed by Wilson and Sperber, to consider the differences between this approach and some alternatives, and to question the status of the notion of a "sentence type", which has often been assumed in analysing the various syntactic structures. Some evidence is provided that certain lexical items also encode procedural information about propositional attitudes, and the role of intonation in utteranceinterpretation is also discussed. This analysis is based on relevance-theoretic assumptions about semantics and pragmatics. Chapter one presents the general approach to semantics assumed by relevance theory and shows how Wilson and Sperber's proposal fits into this framework. Chapter two is concerned with the proposed semantic analysis of imperatives. This analysis is extended to some "pseudo-imperatives": forms consisting of the conjunction or disjunction of an imperative and a declarative clause, which have often