УЛОГА ИНФЕРЕНЦИЈАЛНИХ ПРОЦЕСА У ЕКСПЛИЦИТНОЈ КОМУНИКАЦИЈИ НОВИНСКИХ НАСЛОВА
THE ROLE OF INFERENTIAL PROCESSES IN THE EXPLICIT COMMUNICATION OF NEWSPAPER HEADLINES

Summary/Abstract: Considering written communication one must posit the question of whether the author’s intended meaning can be interpreted from the linguistically encoded meanings of the words used. Working within the relevance-theoretic framework, we examine the underdeterminacy thesis, according to which there is a gap between word meaning and meaning in use. In interpreting the author’s explicitly communicated meaning, the reader’s pragmatic processor bridges the gap by employing certain inferential processes which are motivated by an overall search for relevance in the specific context of communication. The research presented here is based on an analysis of five distinct processes (i.e. disambiguation, reference assignment, saturation, free pragmatic enrichment, and ad hoc concept formation) at work in newspaper headlines from Serbian daily press. Basing our findings on qualitative analysis of the headlines, we conclude that the workings of each of the inferential processes can be easily traced in many examples, and that some of the headlines even show the application of two such processes. This implies that the inferential processes are not entirely independent, but actually interconnected aspects of a single function of the pragmatic processor. In accordance with that, this paper is aimed at presenting how inferential pragmatics can be adequately applied to actual instances of written communication.

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