Relevance Theory
Relevance theory is a framework for the study of cognition, proposed primarily in order to provide a psychologically realistic account of communication. This paper (1) presents relevance theory’s central commitments in detail and explains the theoretical
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Abstract Relevance theory is a framework for the study of cognition, proposed primarily in order to provide a psychologically realistic account of communication. This paper (1) presents relevance theory’s central commitments in detail and explains the theoretical motivations behind them; and (2) shows some of the ways in which these core principles are brought to bear on empirical problems. The core of relevance theory can be divided into two sets of assumptions. Assumptions relating to cognition in general include the definition of relevance as a trade-off between effort and effects, and the claim that cognition tends to maximise relevance. Assumptions about communication include the claims that understanding an utterance is a matter of inferring the speaker’s communicative and informative intentions; and that the communicative principle of relevance and the presumption of optimal relevance mandate the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure, a heuristic that guides the search for the intended interpretation of utterances. Relevance theorists model communication in terms of the working of this comprehension procedure. There are, in addition, several strategies that guide the explanation of phenomena in relevance theory, including: (1) a stronger form of Grice’s Modified Occam’s Razor, (2) the possibility of dividing what is linguistically encoded between conceptual and procedural information; (3) the interpretive/descriptive distinction; (4) the use of ad hoc concepts.
This paper has benefitted greatly from comments and suggestions from Deirdre Wilson and from Carsten Hansen. My thanks to both of them. Remaining mistakes and inclarities are my responsibility. This paper was written at CSMN, University of Oslo, with funding from CSMN and the Research Council of Norway (FRIHUM). N. Allott (&) CSMN, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected]
A. Capone et al. (eds.), Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 2, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-01014-4_3, Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013
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1 Introduction: The Relevance-Theoretic Research Programme Relevance theory is a rather wide-ranging framework (or ‘research programme’— see below) for the study of cognition, devised primarily in order to provide an account of communication that is psychologically realistic and empirically plausible. It was originally proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986b; 1987). Other key publications include Blakemore 1987; Sperber and Wilson 1995; Carston 2002 and Wilson and Sperber 2012. For some time relevance theory has been one of the leading programmes of research in pragmatics. There has been work within the relevance-theoretic framework1 on such central topics as scalar implicatures (Carston 1998; Breheny et al. 2006; Noveck and Sperber 2007), bridging (Wilson and Matsui 1998; Matsui 2000), speech acts and mood (Sperber and Wilson 1986b, pp. 243–254; Wilson and Sperber 1988; Jary 2007; Jary 2010), disambiguation (Sperber and Wilson 1
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