Mental concepts can include emotional and attitudinal information

What is it about?

In relevance-theoretic pragmatics the lower-level or first-order explicature is a propositional form resulting from a series of inferential developments of a logical form. It amounts to the message the speaker communicates explicitly. The higher-level or second-order explicature is a description of the speech act that the speaker performs, her affective attitude towards what she says or her epistemic stance to the communicated information. Information about the speaker’s affective attitude or epistemic stance need not solely be represented in the latter, though. It could be included as beliefs in the mental files of pragmatically adjusted conceptual representations featuring in lower-level explicatures. Those beliefs would originate as lexical pragmatic processes operate and their representation would be triggered by elements like evaluative morphemes, expressive expletives, insulting terms and evidential participles. Although they may be true or false in their own right, such beliefs would not affect the truth-conditional content of the expressed proposition.

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Why is it important?

This paper elaborates on the idea that the ad hoc concepts created during comprehension may incorporate a variety of information, such as information about the speaker's feelings, emotions, attitudes and epistemic stance.