认知语言学前沿系列讲座通知
讲座题目：“Relevance: The Key Principle of All Communication”
讲座教授：Charles Forceville（多模态隐喻国际专家）
时间：2021年9月29日下午16:00-17:30
地点：Zoom
会议链接：https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/84690887666
Biographical information
Charles Forceville is associate professor in the Film/Media Studies department of Universiteit van Amsterdam.The keytheme in his research is the question how visuals, alone or in combination with other modes, convey meaning. Committed to cognitivist and relevance-theoretic approaches, he writes on multimodality in various genres and media (fiction film, documentary, animation, advertising, comics & cartoons, pictograms & traffic signs, pictures in children’s books). In 1996, he publishedPictorial Metaphor in Advertising(Routledge). With Eduardo Urios-Aparisi he co-editedMultimodal Metaphor(Mouton de Gruyter, 2009); with Tony Veale and Kurt FeyaertsCreativity and the Agile Mind(Mouton de Gruyter, 2013); and with Assimakis TseronisMultimodal Argumentation and Rhetoric in Media Genres(Benjamins, 2017). His monographVisual and Multimodal Communication: Applying the Relevance Principleappeared in 2020 with Oxford University Press.
Under his guidance, students of HKU Utrecht made a series of five short animation film on narratology (and one on the JOURNEY metaphor), available on YouTube (2014-2019). Forceville has profiles on Research gate and Academia.edu.
Abstractof the Lecture:The humanities are in need of a general, all-encompassing model of communication. The contours of such a model actually already exist:Relevance Theory: Communication and Cognition(Blackwell 1986). In this monograph anthropologist Dan Sperber and linguist Deirdre Wilson claim that Paul Grice’s four “maxims of conversation” (of quantity, quality, relation, and manner) can actually be reduced to a single one: the maxim of relevance. RT’s central claim is thateach act of communication comes with the presumption of its own optimal relevance to the envisaged audience. Hitherto, however, RT scholars (virtually all: linguists) have almost exclusively analysed face-to-face exchanges between two people who stand next to each other. The type of communication studied is thus predominantly verbal (perhaps supported by gestures and facial expressions).
In order to fulfil RT’s potential to develop into an inclusive theory of communication, it is necessary to explore how it can be adapted and refined to account for (1) communication in other modes than (only) the spoken verbal mode; and for (2) mass-communication. InVisual and Multimodal Communication: Applying the Relevance Principle(Oxford UP 2020) I take a first step toward this goal by proposing how RT works for mass-communicative messages that involve static visuals. In my presentation I will first provide a crash course in “classic” RT for non-linguists, and go on to demonstrate how the theory can be (made) applicable to visual and multimodal communication. Examples discussed include: logos & pictograms; print advertisements; and cartoons.
Importantly, RT is no less but also no more than a model, and has little to contribute to the analysis of specific instances of communication. Therefore, RT cannot replace other theories and approaches that provide analytical models for interpreting specific discourses, such as (social) semiotics, narratology, and stylistics. It only aims to provide an all-encompassing communication model within which the insights from other approaches can be put to optimal use.
