A relevance-based framework for hearer roles in multiparty interactions

This paper proposes a cognitive pragmatic, relevance-theoretic framework for understanding and analysing hearer participant roles in discourse. Relevance theory has been primarily concerned with communicative contexts in which one speaker addresses one hearer. However, individual speakers and individual hearers may not be the only participants in discourses, and individually addressed hearers are certainly not the only participants who process communicative stimuli and derive interpretative hypotheses about a communicator’s intended meaning. In this paper, I consider what the relevance-theoretic pragmatic framework can tell us about these other hearer roles (third-parties, bystanders, eavesdroppers, etc.). The analysis focuses on three key insights: (a) ostensive acts may be shown to third-parties and that this act of showing is ostensive in its own right, (b) addressees and overhearers can be distinguished on the basis of the speaker’s intentions to modify the individual’s cognitive environment, and (c) the presence of non-addressees can affect the communicative act via interaction with the communicator’s abilities and preferences. The framework presented here offers a cognitive underpinning to existing understandings of the various hearer roles that individuals might play in a discourse, while also providing a key expansion of the scope of relevance theory via application to multiparty communicative interactions.