 A striking example of an area long thought of as resistant to theory from outside the domain of art and the aesthetic is that of literary language. Insight into the kind of language we think of as distinctive of poetry, drama and the novel has traditionally been sought from those whose expertise is literature itself rather than from those developing general theories of communication, a view endorsed by Peter Lamarque, who regards the idea that there is value in seeing literary works as akin to quotidian genres of utterance such as letter-writing or political speech making as “utterly misconceived” (Lamarque 2007: 34). But advocates of relevance theory, a naturalistically inclined development of Gricean pragmatics, reject the idea that there is anything fundamentally special or autonomous about literary language, claiming that