Pragmática y simbolización

Abstract Firstly, this paper aims to provide new theoretical insights in the study of literary symbolism with the support of Relevance Theory, Lexical Pragmatics and some contributions of second-generation cognitive sciences. Specifically, it proposes that the meaning of literary symbol consists on the tension between a “literal” meaning and a not paraphrasable abstract meaning. Furthermore, literary symbol needs of a specific communicative context: the “symbolic reading”, whose features are defined. In order to analyze the meaning of literary symbol a perspective close to contextualism has been taken. So, we consider that meanings are underdeterminated and context is always needed to obtain them. The tension between the literal and the abstract meaning is explained with the aid of Rayo´s grab bag model of language mastery and Relevance Theory accounts of metaphor comprehension. Lastly, this framework is applied to the analysis of Juan Eduardo Cirlot’s works, with special attention to his permutation poetry.