Abstract This research explored, within the framework of relevance theory, how normally developing 3- to 9-year-old children and two age groups (age 7–9 and age 10–12) of children with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism (AS/HFA) and their 7- to 9-year-old control group used context when answering questions and giving explanations for their correct answers. The children were asked questions targeting the pragmatic processes of reference assignments, enrichments, routines, implicatures and feelings. They were also asked to explain their correct answers to routine, implicature and feeling questions to elicit understanding about their awareness of how they had derived the answers from the context. In normally developing children the largest increase in correct answers occurred between the ages of 3 and 4 in all question types except feeling questions, where rapid development continued until age 5. After that development progressed more gradually until the age of 8 when the children performed near the ceiling level in all of these question types. Giving explanations for correct answers developed gradually between the ages of 3 and 9, indicating that becoming aware of the information used in inferencing has a longer developmental timeframe. Children's incorrect answers and explanations showed that, as children develop, their answering strategies become more sophisticated as they increasingly utilise context in different ways. Children with AS/HFA were able to answer all the question types. However, compared to the control group, the younger AS/HFA group did less well when answering contextually demanding questions, and the performance of the older AS/HFA group fell in between the younger AS/HFA group and the control group. Both AS/HFA groups had difficulties when giving explanations for their correct answers, showing difficulty in articulating explicitly how they had used context in arriving at the correct answer. Incorrect answers and explanations indicated that, usually, all the children tried to utilise contextual information, although the attempt failed somehow. For children with AS/HFA it was more typical to continue with their answer after first giving a correct answer or explanation, which then led to an irrelevant answer, suggesting that these children had difficulties with stopping processing at the relevant point. / Tiivistelmä Tutkimuksessa tarkasteltiin, kuinka normaalisti kehittyneet 3–9-vuotiaat lapset ja kaksi ikäryhmää lapsia (7–9-vuotiaat ja 10–12-vuotiaat), joilla on Aspergerin oireyhtymä tai hyvätasoinen autismi (AS/HFA) ja heidän 7–9-vuotiaista koostuva kontrolliryhmänsä, käyttivät kontekstia vastatessaan kysymyksiin ja perustellessaan oikeita vastauksiaan. Tutkimus tehtiin relevanssiteorian viitekehyksessä. Lapsilta kysyttiin pragmaattista prosessointia vaativia kysymyksiä, jotka arvioivat viittausten, epätäydellisten lauseiden, rutiinien, implikatuurien ja tunnetilojen ymmärtämistä. Lisäksi heidän tuli perustella oikeat vastaukset rutiini-, implikatuuri- ja tunnekysymyksiin, jotta nähtiin, olivatko lapset tietoisia, kuinka he olivat johtaneet vastauksensa kontekstista. Normaalisti kehittyneillä lapsilla oikeiden vastausten määrä lisääntyi nopeasti 3. ja 4. ikävuoden välillä kaikissa kysymystyypeissä. Tunnekysymyksiin vastaamisessa tämä nopean kehityksen kausi jatkui 5. ikävuoteen saakka. Tämän jälkeen kehitys jatkui hitaampana 8 vuoden ikään saakka, jolloin lapset suoriutuivat lähes kaikista kysymyksistä kaikissa eri kysymystyypeissä. Perustelujen antaminen oikeisiin vastauksiin kehittyi asteittain 3. ja 9. ikävuoden välillä, mikä kertoi, että vastauksessa käytetyn informaation tiedostamisen kehittyminen tapahtui pitemmällä aikavälillä. Lasten virheelliset vastaukset ja perustelut osoittivat, että iän lisääntyessä lasten vastausstrategiat muuttuivat kehittyneemmiksi ja he hyödynsivät kontekstia monin eri tavoin. Lapset, joilla oli AS/HFA, osasivat vastata kaikkiin esitettyihin kysymystyyppeihin. Kuitenkin nuorempi AS/HFA-ryhmä suoriutui kontrolliryhmää heikommin ja vanhemman AS/HFA-ryhmän suoriutuminen sijoittui nuoremman ikäryhmän ja kontrolliryhmän suoriutumisen puoliväliin. Molemmilla AS/HFA-ryhmillä esiintyi vaikeuksia oikeiden vastausten perustelussa, mikä kertoi vaikeudesta ilmaista, kuinka he olivat käyttäneet kontekstia oikeaan vastaukseen pääsemiseksi. Virheelliset vastaukset ja perustelut osoittivat, että yleensä kaikki lapset pyrkivät kontekstin hyödyntämiseen vaikka epäonnistuivatkin siinä. Lapsille, joilla oli AS/HFA, oli tyypillisempää jatkaa vastaamista vielä oikean vastauksen tai perustelun antamisen jälkeen, mikä lopulta johti aiheesta syrjähtämiseen. Tämä kertoi vaikeudesta lopettaa prosessointi relevantissa kohdassa.

Roy Campbell (1901-1957), who ranks among South Africa's leading poets, was also a gifted and skilled translator. Shortly after the Second World War he was commissioned by the Spanish scholar Rafael Martinez Nadal to supply the English translations for a planned edition of the complete works of the Spanish poet and dramatist, Federico Garcia Lorca, to be published by Faber and Faber, London. However, most of these translations remained unpublished until 1985, when the poetry translations (but not the translations of the plays) were included in Volume II of a four-volume edition entitled Campbell: Collected Works, edited by Alexander, Chapman and Leveson, and published in South Africa. In 198617, Eisenberg published a collection of letters from the archives of the Spanish poet and publisher Guillermo de Torre in a Spanish journal, Ana/es de Literatura Espanola, Alicante, which revealed that the politically-motivated intervention in 1946 of Arturo and Ilsa Barea, Republican supporters who were living in exile in London, prevented the publication of Campbell's Lorca translations. These poetry translations are studied here and compared with the work of other translators of Lorca, ranging from Lloyd (1937) to Havard (1990), and including some Afrikaans versions by Uys Krige (1987). For the analysis an eclectic framework is used that incorporates ideas from work on the relevance theory of communication (Sperber and Wilson 1986) as applied to translation theory by Gutt (1990, 1991) and Bell (1991), among others, together with Eco's (1979, 1990) semiotic-interpretive approach. The analysis shows that although Campbell's translating is constrained by its purpose of forming part of a Lorca edition, his versions of Lorca' s poetry are nevertheless predominantly oriented towards the target-language reader. In striving to communicate Lorca's poetry to an English audience, Campbell demonstrates his skill and creativity at all levels of language. Campbell's translations that were published during his lifetime earned him a place among the best poetry translators of this century. The Lorca translations, posthumously added to the corpus of his published work, enhance an already established reputation as a fine translator of poetry. / Classics & Modern European Languages / D. Lit. et Phil. (Spanish)

This thesis proposes elements for a cognitive anthropology of visual art. Most works of art are human-made objects that cannot be approached in purely functional terms, and as such they frustrate important cognitive expectations that people have about artefacts. For this reason, it is hypothesised that art triggers speculation about the artist’s intention, and that it is intuitively approached as a form of communication. By application of Bloom’s (1996) theory of artefact categorisation, and Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) relevance theory of communication, a series of predictions are generated for art categorisation (or definition), art appreciation, and art cultural distribution. Two empirical studies involving more than 1,000 participants tested the most important of these predictions. In study 1, a relationship was found between how much a series of works of art were liked and how easy they were to understand. Study 2 comprised four experiments. In experiment 1, a series of hyperrealistic paintings were preferred when they were labelled as paintings than when they were labelled as photographs. In experiments 2a and 2b, a series of paintings were considered easier to understand and, under some conditions, were preferred, when they were accompanied by titles that made it easier to understand the artist’s intention. In experiment 3, a series of artefacts were more likely to be considered “art” when they were thought to have been created intentionally than when they were thought to have been created accidentally. The results of studies 1 and 2 confirmed the predictions tested, and are interpreted in the framework of relevance theory. The art experience involves speculation about the artist’s intention, and it is partly assessed as a form of communication that is constrained by relevance dynamics. Implications for anthropology of art, psychology of art, and the art world are discussed.

Ce travail s’attache à la construction textuelle du brevet d'invention (type de texte spécialisé très normé) par l’étude des contraintes pragmatiques le structurant et notamment celles le définissant comme une contribution au sens gricéen (Grice), post-gricéen (Nemo, Portuguès) ou non-gricéen (Clark et Schaefer). Il étudie ses stratégies textuelles, par exemple en termes de rhétorique de la revendication, en se penchant sur son format particulier dans lequel sont isolés des éléments récurrents et autonomes, les ensembles contributionnels, et leurs liaisons.La première partie présente l’approche contributionnelle du texte de brevet d’invention. Il s’agit d’une part de décrire le texte comme un objet contributionnel, et d’autre part de se demander dans quelle mesure la confrontation avec un texte hyperformaté conduit à reconsidérer les maximes (gricéennes) régulant les contributions. Le corpus d’étude est constitué d’une base textuelle de brevets d’invention transformée en base de données contributionnelles. L’analyse de celle-ci permet une modélisation contributionnelle du texte de brevet fondée sur des marqueurs délimitant des ensembles contributionnels soumis à un schéma général invariant, prédictible et reproductible. La phase de modélisation est l’occasion de reformuler une partie des maximes gricéennes encadrant la production d’ensembles contributionnels. Dans le cadre d’une conception plurisémique de l’interprétation, la fin de l’étude dégage les propriétés de la strate contributionnelle, en montrant notamment qu’à partir de la contrainte de complétude du texte en train de se construire et au travers des différentes sous-contributions qui le constituent se met en place une mécanique textuelle reposant sur des enchaînements contributionnels spécifiques aux textes formatés. Ces considérations sur la matière contributionnelle des textes permettent d’aborder les fondements d’une théorie contributionnelle du texte. / The present work looks into the textual construction of the patent (very standardized specialized type of text) by the study of pragmatical constraints which structure it and in particular of the constraints which define it as a contribution in a Gricean (Grice), post-Gricean (Nemo, Portuguès) and non-Gricean (Clark and Schaefer) meaning. This work studies the textual strategies involved, particularly in terms of the rhetoric of claiming, by examining over its particular format in which are isolated recurring and autonomous elements, - the contributional sets, and their connections.The first part presents a contributional approach of patents as texts, describing patent text as a contributional object and discussing the way the confrontation with hyper-formatted and strongly constrained textual data may lead to reconsider and reformulate contributional maxims. The corpus of study consists of a textual data base of patents which is then formatted into contributional data. The analysis of this contributional data allows a contributional modeling of the patent text based on markers which defined contributional groups subject to general master scheme which is invariable, predictable and reproducible. This phase of modeling provides an opportunity to partly reformulate the Gricean maxims which frame the production of the contributional groups. Using a plurisemic approach of interpretation, the end of the study intends to release the properties of the contributional layer, by showing in particular that the constraint of exhaustivity which is at work in the construction of the text through various sub-contributions leads to the emergence of a mechanical text, with its laws and constraints, based on contributional chains specific to very formatted texts and more general texts alike. These considerations on the contributional material of the texts allow an approach to the foundations of a contributional theory of text.

Il presente lavoro offre un’analisi linguistica dell’implicito nei racconti "Drakon" [Il drago], "Peščera" [La caverna] e "Mamaj", scritti da Evgenij Zamjatin tra il 1918 e il 1920 e noti come ciclo di Pietrogrado. Il tema è motivato sia dalle caratteristiche di questi testi, in cui il riferimento al contesto post-rivoluzionario e la critica alla rivoluzione sono molto chiari, ma del tutto impliciti, e il lettore può solo inferirli partendo dal testo e dalla conoscenza del contesto condiviso con lo scrittore, sia dallo studio degli scritti di Zamjatin sulla prosa, in cui emerge che l’implicito è uno degli strumenti principali con cui egli realizza la sua concezione di opera letteraria, frutto della cooperazione fra autore e lettore. Per l’analisi abbiamo utilizzato gli strumenti offerti dalla teoria della pertinenza, elaborata a partire dagli anni Ottanta da Dan Sperber e Deirdre Wilson, e più precisamente i concetti di implicatura ed esplicatura; essi risultano particolarmente produttivi rispetto a quelli della retorica tradizionale, i quali illuminano la fattura del testo, ma non spiegano come da essa il lettore arrivi a comprenderlo e interpretarlo, come avvenga, cioè, la collaborazione creativa che Zamjatin pone al centro della propria estetica. / The present work offers a linguistic analysis of implicitness in the stories "Drakon" [The Dragon], "Peščera" [The Cave] and "Mamaj", written by Yevgeny Zamyatin between 1918 and 1920 and known as his Petrograd cycle of stories. This topic is justified not only by the peculiarities of these texts, whose reference to post-revolutionary context and criticism of revolution are very clear but quite implicit, and the reader can only infer them from the text and the context he shares with the writer, but also by what Zamyatin stated in his essays on prose, where implicitness is one of the main instruments for achieving his idea of literary work as the result of the cooperation between author and reader. The analysis proceeds by applying the elements provided by the relevance theory which has been developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson since the eighties, and particularly that of implicature and explicature; they are more fruitful than traditional rhetorical categories, which shed light on the way Zamyatin’s texts are built, but do not explain how the reader understands and interprets them, that is, how the creative cooperation pointed out in Zamyatin’s aesthetics takes place.

Roy Campbell (1901-1957), who ranks among South Africa's leading poets, was also a gifted and skilled translator. Shortly after the Second World War he was commissioned by the Spanish scholar Rafael Martinez Nadal to supply the English translations for a planned edition of the complete works of the Spanish poet and dramatist, Federico Garcia Lorca, to be published by Faber and Faber, London. However, most of these translations remained unpublished until 1985, when the poetry translations (but not the translations of the plays) were included in Volume II of a four-volume edition entitled Campbell: Collected Works, edited by Alexander, Chapman and Leveson, and published in South Africa. In 198617, Eisenberg published a collection of letters from the archives of the Spanish poet and publisher Guillermo de Torre in a Spanish journal, Ana/es de Literatura Espanola, Alicante, which revealed that the politically-motivated intervention in 1946 of Arturo and Ilsa Barea, Republican supporters who were living in exile in London, prevented the publication of Campbell's Lorca translations. These poetry translations are studied here and compared with the work of other translators of Lorca, ranging from Lloyd (1937) to Havard (1990), and including some Afrikaans versions by Uys Krige (1987). For the analysis an eclectic framework is used that incorporates ideas from work on the relevance theory of communication (Sperber and Wilson 1986) as applied to translation theory by Gutt (1990, 1991) and Bell (1991), among others, together with Eco's (1979, 1990) semiotic-interpretive approach. The analysis shows that although Campbell's translating is constrained by its purpose of forming part of a Lorca edition, his versions of Lorca' s poetry are nevertheless predominantly oriented towards the target-language reader. In striving to communicate Lorca's poetry to an English audience, Campbell demonstrates his skill and creativity at all levels of language. Campbell's translations that were published during his lifetime earned him a place among the best poetry translators of this century. The Lorca translations, posthumously added to the corpus of his published work, enhance an already established reputation as a fine translator of poetry. / Classics and Modern European Languages / D. Lit. et Phil. (Spanish)