"Implicature-Laden" Elicitations in Talk Radio Shows

Ágnes Herczeg-Deli

doi:10.2478/v10015-011-0016-y

Authors

Ágnes Herczeg-Deli Eszterházy Károly College, Eger, Hungary

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2478/v10015-011-0016-y

Abstract

Indirect elicitations in talk radio programmes on BBC Radio are not uncommon, notwithstanding, misunderstanding between the host and his conversational partner is not frequent. Investigating some of the reasons this paper focuses on how the socio-cultural and cognitive factors of the context interweave in discourse. The author suggests that valid interpretation and appropriate response to inferred elicitations can be best explained within the framework of Relevance Theory, and more specifically, with the presumption of accessibility of schemas obtained from the cognitive environment of the discourse partners. Through examples of empirical research the paper aims to reveal how the mutual knowledge of the participants controls discourse via the mental processes occurring in the interaction of two minds.

Author Biography

Ágnes Herczeg-Deli, Eszterházy Károly College, Eger, Hungary

Ágnes Herczeg-Deli graduated from Lajos Kossuth University Debrecen, Hungary with MA degrees in English and Russian (1978), and holds a doctorate from the Department of General and Applied Linguistics of the same university. In 1989 she spent a semester in the School of English at the University of Birmingham, England, doing research in text, discourse and discourse intonation. In 1995 she returned to Birmingham for a short-term research in the Collins Cobuild Centre. She is currently affiliated with the English Studies Department of Eszterházy Károly College, Eger, Hungary, where she teaches English syntax and semantics, rhetoric, communication, text linguistics and discourse analysis. Her recent research interests are primarily in the impact of the cognitive context on meaning, discourse functions and processes, prosodic aspects of elicitations, cognitive and interpersonal processes in written text and rhetoric in advertising.

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