This session presents and explores ideas from a project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, which applies ideas from linguistic pragmatics in accounting for how literary and other texts are produced, interpreted and evaluated. Contributions in this session will present key ideas from the project, discuss them from a range of perspectives (linguistics, literary studies, creative writing, and pedagogy), and conclude with time for questions and discussion.

Billy Clark, the project leader, will begin the session by outlining the key ideas of the project. Most work in linguistic pragmatics, building on ideas developed by Paul Grice (collected in Studies in the Way of Words, 1989), has focused on interpretation. This project proposes new accounts of the processes involved in production and aesthetic and stylistic evaluation, connects these with ideas about interpretation, and integrates them in a comprehensive overall account.

One key idea of the project is that production, interpretation and evaluation often happen simultaneously. In face to face communication, including many forms of digital communication, individual communicators are typically involved in all three processes at the same time. The situation is more complex where production and responses to texts are separated in space and/or time.

The project proposes that both production and evaluation involve consideration of potential effects of texts. It builds on previous work (Park and Clark 2022) on the idea that production is constrained by one or more heuristics which share some properties of the comprehension heuristic proposed in relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986, Wilson and Sperber 2004), and proposals by Clark (2012, 2014, 2019), about the processes involved in editing the short stories of Raymond Carver and about what affects positive and negative evaluations of work by Chekhov and Eimear McBride. It goes further than previous work in considering the extent to which the processes in each of the three areas involve fairly explicit, conscious reasoning and the extent to which they are spontaneous and intuitive. The project explores the idea that even fairly explicit reasoning involves spontaneous and intuitive processes.

Tony Williams will then present ideas about creative writing developed in the project and in related work. The practice of writing can involve deliberative, intuitive and unconscious elements, writerly intention and reasons, but remains complex and difficult to articulate. Ideas from linguistic pragmatics can help to articulate and understand what happens when writers write, and when they take part in writing workshops. The discussion here focuses on three ideas related to the project. First, it considers the extent to which writers envisage the potential effects of their writing on audiences, in drafting and in revision, and how they adjust their writing in the light of this. Second, it considers the kinds of processes involved in writing and revision, how (and to what extent) writers think fairly consciously about what they are doing, and how more spontaneous, intuitive processes are involved. Finally, it considers how ideas from the project can be useful in understanding how writers talk about their writing, which might be closer to or further away from the actual processes involved.

Anne Furlong will explore ideas about all three aspects (production, interpretation, and evaluation) from the point of view of a literary scholar, particularly in the production, mediation, and evaluation of stylistic choices in adaptations of literary works (intramedial as well as transmediated). She argues that readers typically anticipate near-identity both of stylistic devices and of interpretative effects between source and adaptation. Adaptors who aim for high levels of resemblance, with the goal of reproducing the effects of the source work as fully as possible, are more likely to attempt to replicate stylistic devices in the new work (if intramedial) or to actively seek out techniques in the new medium which are functionally equivalent. The production of style by the author, its interpretation by adaptors, and the evaluation of style by audiences of both the source and new work, can be illuminated by a relevance-theoretic approach.

Together, these presentations will present the ideas from the project with critical commentary on its progress so far and an indication of how these ideas can be developed in a range of contexts, including the development of theories of communication, literary scholarship, creative writing, and the teaching of each of these.

The session will conclude with the floor open for questions and comments.