Teorie relevance a nově vznikající diskurzní částice

This article explores the relevance-theory view of utterance interpretation (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995) and illustrates its application in a qualitative investigation of authentic corpus data. The purpose is to show that observations derived from corpora can shed significant light on how constraints on relevance are practised by real speakers in real discourse contexts. The study focuses on discourse markers and argues that there is a need to focus more systematically on emerging discourse markers and their contributions to relevance. It is argued that the corpus-based approach can lead to new knowledge about pragmatic functions and subtle differences between different items, and that this extends beyond what is gained from a strictly theoretical or experimental approach, by far the most common approaches in the previous relevance-theory literature. As a case in point, the article includes an empirical study of the discourse marker as if, based on the large English TenTen corpus (Jakubíček et al., 2013).