The communicative relevance in fictional discourse

Resumo

Searle (1975) evidenced two programmatic questions about the logic of fictional discourse: why evolution would have selected fiction as a cross-cultural behavior and what enables an author to use words literally without committing to their literal meanings in fictional communication. Ferreira (in press) argues that part of the problem lies on a Searle‘s conception that by violating the logical rules of assertive sentences, the fictional communication constitutes itself as parasitic ordinary language. Alternatively, this paper discusses the fictional model of communication by relevance theory (Sperber, Wilson 1995), showing that ordinary communication and fictional discourse are second-order representations or metarepresentations.