The particle "eh" and the Theory of Relevance. An example of procedural content Silvia Ramírez Gelbes

Abstract

The Relevance Theory poses that human communication is reached through the interaction of ostension and inference in search of relevance. And relevance is a comparative concept based on the relationship between an assumption given by the speaker and a context rebuilt by the addressee. In the relevance-theoretic framework, an utterance is expected to encode two types of information: the conceptual content (about the information on representations) and the procedural content (about the information on how to manipulate representations).

The analysis of the particle "eh" was chosen here as an example of procedural content that constraints higher level explicatures and guides inferences toward confirmation. This is why we consider the occurrence of "eh" in several speech acts and conclude that the presence of this particle gives an instruction like "Take this utterance as an utterance where the speaker says what she says seriously".