A RELEVANCE THEORETIC APPROACH TO THE INTRODUCTION OF SCANDINAVIAN PRONOUNS IN ENGLISH Manuel Padilla Cruz (University of Seville) 1. Introduction The introduction of Scandinavian third person plural pronouns has traditionally been accounted for as a result of the influence of languages in contact, as well as a change in which phonetic, morphologic and syntactic factors, played a crucial role (Barber, 1993; Baugh & Cable, 1993; Blake, 1992; Görlach, 1997; Pyles & Algeo, 1982). Without denying the validity of previous approaches, this work will present a complementary explanation that could contribute to a better understanding of this phenomenon from the pragmatic framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986, 1995). It will be argued that the loss of inflections and the development of the original Old English (OE henceforth) third person pronoun involved a loss of procedural meaning (Blakemore, 1987, 1992; Wilson & Sperber, 1993) which affected the recovery of explicatures of utterances by hearers. Therefore, the introduction of the new pronominal forms could be explained as an attempt at constraining in a better way the recovery of those explicatures, since pronouns are both truth-conditional and procedural expressions (Wilson & Sperber 1993). First of all, I will present very briefly the pronominal system in OE and its evolution to Middle English (ME henceforth), together with an account of the loss of verbal inflection. After having done so, I will introduce some of the basic theoretical postulates of Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986, 1995) on which this work is based, and, finally, I will present my proposal to understand the changes that took place in the evolution of the pronominal system.