INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL RELEVANCE OF SPEECH INTERACTION IN THE CONTEXT OF PARLIAMENTARY DELIBERATION

Abstract

The category of relevance is one of the fundamental categories of the communicative interaction. The need for harmonized and effective communication is stipulated by adaptive communication strategies and approaches used towards both recipient and the conditions surrounding the communication process. Purpose. The article deals with the category of relevance, seen as a condition for successful coordination of cognitive models of interlocutors. The author outlines and considers two main factors underlying miscommunication: the discrepancies in cognitive competences and the disagreement over intentions, being the internal and external aspects of relevance. Materials and methods. The research is based on the analysis of the official transcripts and videos of the plenary debates of the French Assamblée Nationale. Methods applied include content analysis and logical analysis. Results. The present study shows that the internal and external aspects of relevance prove to be decisive in the context of a deliberative dialogue in parliamentary discourse. On the basis of a massively modular view of the human mind, the author postulates various types of relevance: propositional, illocutionary, interpersonal and argumentative. The author concludes that in parliamentary debates shouts, comments and remarks resulting from intuitive inferences are caused either by cognitive resonance or dissonance when it comes to relevance of discourse. These forms of feedback are presented as a reaction to certain ostensive triggers embedded in the main speaker’s sentences and marking their (ir)relevance. Practical implications. Further research, development, extension and evaluation of typology of triggers and markers of relevance might be of interest for the interactive cognitive-discursive analysis of not only parliamentary communication, but also any other communicative interaction characterized by deliberations.

Keywords

• relevance
• speech interaction
• internal and external relevance
• cognitive relevance
• argumentative relevance
• cognitive resonance