Dr. Ryoko Sasamoto will give a public lecture for IRAAL (Irish Association for Applied Linguistics) on the topic of ‘Application of Cognitive Pragmatics: Relevance theory and multi-modality’ on Wednesday 6th March at 7.30 in C165, Henry Grattan Building, Dublin City University. See below for the abstract.

Relevance Theory is a pragmatic theory proposed by Dan Sperber & Deirdre Wilson in the late 80s. It has since been developed to be one of the most influential theories in linguistics. The development of cross-media and multi-modal communication in recent years has led to the increasing interests in the relationship between human cognition and persuasive power. How can advertisers hijack consumers’ interpretation process to alter their attitudes?  How do TV producers manipulate viewers? How can cognitive pragmatics deal with meta-intentions in multi-modal communicative contents? This talk will address some answers to those questions & and discuss implications for theoretical development of relevance theory. This talk will be of particular interest to those working in the pragmatics, discourse studies and related interdisciplinary areas such as media communication and applied linguistics.