E

Echoic Use Echoic use is a technical term developed in the framework of relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1981, 1990a, 1995, 1998a; Wilson and Sperber 1992; Wilson 2006). Echoic use was originally construed as part of the ‘use-mention’ distinction proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1981) to address verbal irony: how it is defined, how it can be explained and what the mechanism is for interpreting it. According to the usemention distinction drawn in philosophy (Davidson 1979a), expressions may be ‘used’ to refer to entities and states of affairs, or expressions may be ‘mentioned’ to refer to the expressions themselves (Sperber and Wilson 1981: 303). Bank is ‘used’ in (1) to refer to the destination of a particular individual called Ian, while bank is ‘mentioned’ in (2) to refer to the word bank itself:

(1) Ian went to the bank. (2) ‘Bank’ is an ambiguous word.