On Negotiated Listener Meaning As Reflected In The British Comedy Series The Thin Blue Line

This study approaches the negotiated listener meaning resulting from the phenomenon of mismatch between contexts within the framework of relevance theory by Sperber and Wilson, with language data for analysis from the British comedy series The Thin Blue Line. It is widely agreed that in a certain communicative event, contextual or background assumptions play a crucial role for a hearer to make a choice of meaning, but there is little agreement on how the meanings are selected, and once selected, how exactly they work in interaction. Different from the attempts at the notion of relevance by other scholars, Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory concerns the role of context as a central point in verbal communication and understanding. Within the framework of relevance theory, this thesis focuses on the mismatch between the various contexts as supposed to be understood by the participants in a certain communicative event that leads to negotiated listener meaning. The thesis addresses such a question: when mismatch between contexts occurs, how does the hearer make a choice from possible negotiated meanings? In other words, what pragmatic criteria does the hearer take when evaluating the interpretation of an utterance? The answer proposed here is that the hearer's choice of meaning is determined by the pragmatic criterion of consistency with the principle of relevance. The explanatory power of this criterion is tested against an alternative scenario-based account. All the language data for analysis are transcribed from the British comedy series The Thin Blue Line.