The Recovery of Multiple Meanings

Relevance theory treats the identification of explicature or explicit content, as equally inferential as that of implicature or implicit content. Explicature is recovered via decoding, disambiguation, reference assignment, and other pragmatic enrichment processes. Words containing multiple meanings, for example, are reduced to one meaning through a disambiguation process, which is guided by the Principle of Relevance. Once his expectations of relevance are satisfied, the recipient will stop searching for further meanings. However, there are language uses where the recipient is required to recover multiple meanings, and his expectations of relevance will not be satisfied until these intended meanings are identified. Kakekotoba and share, for example, have been traditionally used in Japanese societies to communicate two or more meanings by exploiting homonyms or words with the same sound but with different meanings. Kakekotoba and share cause an increase in processing effort by requiring the recipient to recover two or more meanings intended by the communicator, but this extra effort is outweighed by a gain in cognitive effects. The interpretation of these utterances is also guided by the Principle of Relevance, as with other utterances, and the recipient can achieve relevance through the recovery of multiple meanings, which offsets the extra processing effort required