Towards a New Account of Interpreting: Levinson’s Heuristics in the Interpretation of Press Conferences

Sufyan Abuarrah

Abstract


This study refers to interpretation as a speedy and effortless process through Levinson’s utterance-type-meaning (1995, 2000). It applies Levinson’s heuristics (Q, I and M) to warrant the message accuracy and trigger the utterance meaning and function in more immediate and stereotypical manner. The heuristics were applied to the interpretation of a number of press conferences between Arabic and English. The heuristics as pragmatic principles of communication assist interpreters to produce a message that is most consistent with the speaker’s knowledge of the world or what s/he believes to be true, expand and compress the TM’s components as allocated in the SM, and communicate any reiterative, emotive, and persuasive functions through a similar level of markedness. 


Keywords


Interpretation; Levinson’s heuristics; Communication; Implicature; Press conferences

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/8903

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