The interdependence of repetition and relevance in university lectures Rosa Giménez-Moreno a,b, * a Department of English and German Studies, University of Valencia (UVEG), Facultad de Filología, Traducción y Comunicación, Avda de Blasco Ibán ̃ ez, 32, Valencia 46010, Spain b Department of English and German Studies, Faculty of Economics, Avda. de los Naranjos, s/n, Valencia 46022, Spain Received 2 September 2011; received in revised form 17 February 2012; accepted 19 February 2012 Abstract The world of professional communication includes so many innovative practices that a 25-century-old typology on repetition like Aristotle's or even a 40-year-old theory on relevance like Grice's might seem obsolete or hardly appealing for today's lecturers. This research aims to examine and illustrate the interdependence between relevance and repetition in current lecturing by firstly reviewing the main communicative strategies used to indicate relevance in this genre, highlighting the essential role of repetition when understanding and processing relevant information. After providing an account of the most frequent repetition mechanisms lecturers currently employ, a corpus of business lectures in English is analysed to detect their ‘Relevant Information Units’ (RIU) and to account for the rhetorical mechanisms used to repeat these units. This work provides evidence that classical rhetorical strategies remain up-to-date and indispensable in effective lecturing today, also underlines the particular role of Grice's maxims and Relevance Theory in this context where relevance and repetition are inter-reliant and mutually supporting communicative entities which need to be jointly defined and applied. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Relevance; Repetition; Lectures; Spoken academic English; Rhetorical strategies; Effective teaching methods 1. Introduction One of the oldest and most frequent pedagogical strategies used in university contexts is the repetition of words and concepts. From Aristotle's time diverse typologies of lexical and semantic repetition have been designed and applied to help professional speakers make their speeches easier to understand, more attractive or more persuasive. However, when we unexpectedly ask our colleagues from other disciplines which repetition strategies they find most effective in their lectures, some of them seem to be surprised and hesitant, others reduce their answer to one or two main strategies (mainly through the use of handouts, PowerPoint slides or other ICT); in general, most of them have some difficulty in providing a comprehensive answer. The fact is that in current university lecturing contexts, content repetition mechanisms are often used almost unconsciously or automatically by lecturers who are frequently unaware of the power the communicative tool they are using possesses. In order to provide both theoretical and practical grounds to understand and use repetition strategies more effectively, specialists within the field of Applied Linguistics have studied the main discourse functions of semantic and lexical repetition; for example, it is a well-known cohesive and signposting tool (Allison and Tauroza, 1995) and an effective interactive device (Thompson, 2001). Within the field of lecturing, many studies have highlighted the vital role of repetition www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 744–755 * Correspondence address: Department of English and German Studies, University of Valencia (UVEG), Facultad de Filología, Traducción y Comunicación, Avda de Blasco Ibáñez, 32, Valencia 46010, Spain. Tel.: +34 9638 64262/28429/64082; fax: +34 963864161/961625429. E-mail address: Rosa.Gimenez@uv.es. 0378-2166/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.02.013