RELEVANCE THEORY.
. Introduction
Relevance theory may be seen as an attempt to work out in detail one of Grice’s central claims:
that an essential feature of most human communication, both verbal and non-verbal, is the
expression and recognition of intentions (Grice 1989: Essays 1-7, 14, 18; Retrospective
Epilogue). In developing this claim, Grice laid the foundations for an inferential model of
communication, an alternative to the classical code model. According to the code model, a
communicator encodes her intended message into a signal, which is decoded by the
audience using an identical copy of the code. According to the inferential model, a
communicator provides evidence of her intention to convey a certain meaning, which is
inferred by the audience on the basis of the evidence provided. An utterance is, of course, a
linguistically coded piece of evidence, so that verbal comprehension involves an element of
decoding. However, the linguistic meaning recovered by decoding is just one of the inputs to
a non-demonstrative inference process which yields an interpretation of the speaker's
meaning.
The goal of inferential pragmatics is to explain how the hearer infers the speaker’s meaning
on the basis of the evidence provided. The relevance-theoretic account is based on another of
Grice’s central claims: that utterances automatically create expectations which guide the hearer
towards the speaker’s meaning. Grice described these expectations in terms of a Co-operative
Principle and maxims of Quality (truthfulness), Quantity (informativeness), Relation (relevance)
and Manner (clarity) which speakers are expected to observe (Grice 1961; 1989: 368-72): the
interpretation a rational hearer should choose is the one that best satisfies those expectations.
On other hand oxford university defines Relevance theory as a cognitive approach to pragmatics
which starts from two broadly Gricean assumptions: (a) that much human communication, both
verbal and non-verbal, involves the overt expression and inferential recognition of intentions, and
(b) that in inferring these intentions, the addressee presumes that the communicator’s behavior will
meet certain standards, which for Grice are based on a Cooperative Principle and maxims, and for
relevance theory are derived from the assumption that, as a result of constant selection pressures in
the course of human evolution, both cognition and communication are relevance-oriented.
Relevance is defined in terms of cognitive (or contextual) effects and processing effort: other things
being equal, the greater the cognitive effects and the smaller the processing effort, the greater the
relevance.
A long-standing aim of relevance theory has been to show that building an adequate theory of
communication involves going beyond Grice’s notion of speaker’s meaning. Another is to provide a
conceptually unified account of how a much broader variety of communicative acts than Grice was
concerned with—including cases of both showing that and telling that—are understood. The
resulting pragmatic theory differs from Grice’s in several respects. It sees explicit communication as
much richer and more inferential than Grice thought, with encoded sentence meanings providing no
more than clues to the speaker’s intentions. It rejects the close link that Grice saw between implicit
communication and (real or apparent) maxim violation, showing in particular how figurative
utterances might arise naturally and spontaneously in the course of communication. It offers an
account of vagueness or indeterminacy in communication, which is often abstracted away from in
more formally oriented frameworks. It investigates the role of context in comprehension, and shows
how tentative hypotheses about the intended combination of explicit content, contextual
assumptions, and implicatures might be refined and mutually adjusted in the course of the
comprehension process in order to satisfy expectations of relevance.
Relevance theory treats the borderline between semantics and pragmatics as co-extensive with the
borderline between (linguistic) decoding and (pragmatic) inference. It sees encoded sentence
meanings as typically fragmentary and incomplete, and as having to undergo inferential enrichment
or elaboration in order to yield fully propositional forms. It reanalyzes Grice’s conventional
implicatures—which he saw as semantic but non-truth-conditional aspects of the meaning of words
like but and so—as encoding procedural information with dedicated pragmatic or more broadly
cognitive functions, and extends the notion of procedural meaning to a range of further items such
as pronouns, discourse particles, mood indicators, and affective intonation.
THE FOUNDER.
It was first proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, and is used within cognitive linguistics
and pragmatics. Relevance eory
Initially, Sperber & Wilson proposed one Principle of Relevance to account for the fact that
an act of ostension carries a guarantee of its eventual relevance, but in the Postface to the
second edition of their book Relevance (Sperber & Wilson, 1995: 260ff), they propose that
we can distinguish a broad a cognitive principle of relevance: “human cognition tends to be
geared to the maximization of relevance”), as well as a narrower communicative principle of
relevance: “every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own
optimal relevance”, the latter being the main focus of analysis within pragmatics.
But the former is important too, since it stresses the fact that we are biologically geared
towards processing the most relevant inputs available. Besides, it is this evolved disposition
that allows for the prediction of the mental states of others, which is crucial in human
communication.
CURRENT ISSUES AND OPEN DEBATES
The explicit/implicit distinction
One of the key differences between Grice’s model and Sperber & Wilson’s lies in the
demarcation of explicit and implicit communication. For Grice, what is said involved little
inference, mainly reduced to disambiguation and reference assignment, while all the
inferential load was laid upon the derivation of implicatures, the latter being obtained after an
interpretation reduced to the literal meaning has been found inappropriate, in a so-called dual-
stage processing. Sperber & Wilson reject this view and favor a more adequate, mutual
parallel adjustment of explicit content –explicatures– and implicit import –implicatures–
during interpretation, and with no pre-conceived sequential arrangement.
Within RT, explicitly communicated information not only demands as much
contextualization as do implicatures, but also covers aspects of communicated meaning which
Grice included in the term implicature (e.g. the so-called generalized conversational
implicatures, most of which are now pictured as explicit information, see Levinson, 2000;
Carston, 2002).
Besides implicatures, Sperber & Wilson propose two types of explicitly
communicated information: the basic-level explicature, and the higher-level explicature.
The latter also includes the speaker’s attitude (to regret that…, to be happy that…, etc.) or a
higher-order speech-act schema (to be asking that…, to be ordering that…, etc.). Both
explicatures and implicatures allow for degrees (i.e., strong and weak
explicatures/implicatures), depending on the addressee’s responsibility for their derivation
and the amount of mental processing required.
Other notions used by other authors in the definition of explicit information, for
instance literal meaning or what is said, are put into question by Sperber & Wilson, since
these do not play any useful role in the study of verbal comprehension: “even when a literal
meaning is available, it is not automatically the preferred interpretation of an utterance. In
fact, literalness plays no role in our account of language comprehension, and nor does the
notion of what is said” (Wilson & Sperber, 2002b: 586). This is because, among other
reasons, hearers commonly derive loose interpretations rather than purely literal ones:
“hearers have no objection to strictly false approximations as long as the conclusions they
bother to derive from them are true. In fact, they might prefer the shorter approximations to
their longer-winded but strictly true counterparts for reasons of economy of effort” .
Whereas Bach (1994) has proposed a third term, implicature, half-way between
explicatures and implicatures, other authors, such as Vicente (2002), reject this blurring of the
explicit/implicit dichotomy. The term ‘implicature’ covers several cases which would fit into
Sperber & Wilson’s notion of explicature, basically being completions of the semantic
representation of the sentence (e.g. ‘The table is too wide’ [to go through the door]) and non-
literal uses of sentences in which no constituent is being used non-literally, what Bach calls
standardized non-literality (e.g. (said to a person who has cut himself) ‘You are not going to
die’
According to relevance theory, a cognitive pragmatics theory of human communication (Sperber
and Wilson, 1995), in the process of interacting with various sources of information, individuals
maximize their ability to identify the relevance of the stimuli that they process. explains that in
relevance processing one of the most essential mechanisms is the "human ability to combine
contextual… information with new incoming information to yield relevant conclusions, as in … 1)
new information…, 2) information already available (from encyclopedic knowledge)," and relevant
conclusion inferred by combining the two mentioned criteria .Initially, Sperber & Wilson proposed
one Principle of Relevance to account for the fact that an act of ostension carries a guarantee of its
eventual relevance, but in the Postface to the second edition of their book Relevance (Sperber &
Wilson), they propose that
we can distinguish a broad a cognitive principle of relevance: “human cognition tends to be
geared to the maximisation of relevance”), as well as a narrower communicative principle of
relevance: “every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own
optimal relevance), the latter being the main focus of analysis within pragmatics.
But the former is important too, since it stresses the fact that we are biologically geared
towards processing the most relevant inputs available. Besides, it is this evolved disposition
that allows for the prediction of the mental states of others, which is crucial in human
communication.
The communicative principle involves a definition of optimal relevance comprising
two parts: (a) The ostensive stimulus is relevant enough for it to be worth the addressee’s
effort to process it; and (b) The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one compatible with
the communicator’s abilities and preferences (Sperber & Wilson). As
Wilson & Sperber correctly point out, communicators “cannot be expected
to go against their own interests and preferences in producing an utterance. There may be
relevant information that they are unable or unwilling to provide, and ostensive stimuli that
would convey their intentions more economically, but that they are unwilling to produce, or
unable to think of at the time”. All this is covered by clause (b) of the definition of optimal
relevance, which states that the ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one “that the
communicator is WILLING AND ABLE to produce
Assessing relevance: Cognitive effects versus processing effort
Unlike what is the case in ‘static’ pragmatics, which foregrounds the importance of context
but somehow takes it for given or is merely interested in dissecting, as it were, its elements,
Sperber & Wilson’s theory views the context as a dynamic, mental entity made up of a sub-set
of the person’s assumptions about the world; it is this subset which is accessed in the search
for relevance. Often several extensions of context are required in order to arrive at an
optimally relevant interpretation. However, as soon as one interpretation is found to be
satisfactory, interpretation stops and no other interpretive hypotheses are considered: “when a
hearer following the path of least effort finds an interpretation which satisfies his expectations
of relevance, in the absence of contrary evidence, this is the best possible interpretive
hypothesis” (Wilson & Sperbe).
The aforementioned Communicative Principle of Relevance predicts a basic procedure
for hearers when hypothesizing about contextual extensions required for the interpretation of
a verbal stimulus: to consider interpretive hypotheses in order of accessibility (following a
path of least effort) and to stop when they arrive at an interpretation which satisfies the
expectations of relevance raised by the stimulus itself. Relevance, then, is a matter of balance
between the interest that the utterance might provide (in terms of so-called “positive cognitive
effects”) and the mental effort that obtaining this interest demands.
Relevance is a characteristic of an input to the human cognitive processes which, when
processed in a certain context, yields positive cognitive effects. Since there are too many
possible stimuli to which we can pay attention, our cognitive architecture is designed to
allocate our processing effort in such a way that benefit is maximized. Hence, relevance has to
do with the improvement of the person’s knowledge; this can be achieved either by adding
new information, by revising existing assumptions, or by yielding new conclusions resulting
from the combination of old and new information (in this case contextual implications are
generated).
The definition of relevance of an input to an individual involves two clauses: “(a)
everything else being equal, the greater the positive cognitive effects achieved in an
individual by processing an input at a given time, the greater the relevance of the input to that
individual at that time; and (b) everything else being equal, the smaller the processing effort
expended by the individual in achieving those effects, the greater the relevance of the input to
that individual at that time” (Wilson & Sperber)
COGNITIVE PRINCIPLE AND COMMUNICATIVE PRINCIPLE
In relevance theory ,the cooperative principle is replaced by the principle of relevance,and this I
turn is craimed to make the separate maxims redundant. According to carston(2002),the principle of
relevance comprises two sub-principles,the cognitive principle and communicative principle.
COGNITIVE PRINCIPLE
The concept of Cognitive Pragmatics
For some linguists – especially those who study what is called the “core” of gram-
mar with the aim of producing formal representations of its structure – the idea of
there actually being a linguistic discipline that goes by the name of Cognitive
Pragmatics may well be a rather hair-raising thought. The interbreeding of two ap-
proaches to the study of language, the cognitive-linguistic one and the pragmatic
one, each of which is notorious for defying all attempts to formulate hard and fast
rules and generalizations, can only result in a hybrid that epitomizes adhocness,
slipperiness and vagueness. This understandable reaction precisely pinpoints the
challenge that Cognitive Pragmatics and the current Handbook are facing – the
challenge, as it were, of generalizing what appears to be ungeneralizable. While
cognitive processes are, by definition, carried out in individual minds, which renders
them to a considerable extent idiosyncratic, and while pragmatic processes are,
again more or less by definition, context-dependent and thus largely unpredictable,
the aim of this handbook is to identify the general cognitive-pragmatic principles
and processes that underlie and determine the construal of meaning-in-context.
A second group of linguists – those with a “pragmatic” bent – are maybe not
unlikely to observe that, in a sense at least, the expression Cognitive Pragmatics
is a tautology. And, indeed, reading some of the classics in the pragmatic litera-
ture such as Grice’s (1975) account of implicatures and how they are worked
out, or Searle’s (1975) description of the ten steps which hearers have to go
through in order to arrive at the interpretation of indirect speech acts, the impres-
sion that pragmatics has been cognitive all along is clearly substantiated. The title
of Sperber and Wilson’s seminal book Relevance: Communication and Cognition
(1986, 2nd edition 1995) and their formulation of a cognitive principle of relevance
alongside a communicative one provide further support. Nevertheless, there can be
no doubt that neither the “narrow”, “Anglo-American”, nor the “broad”, “Conti-
nental [European]” strand of pragmatics (Huang 2007: xi; cf. Bublitz and Norrick
2011: 3) is rooted in psychological or cognitive-science approaches but rather in
philosophical, action-theoretical and sociological ones. The major markers of what
a given scientific approach is like, i.e. its research questions and topics, methods
and argumentation patterns, indicate very clearly that scholars and researchers who
work in the field of pragmatics traditionally do not target psychologically plau-ible, let alone
“realistic” models of the construal of meaning-in-context, but prio-
ritize criteria such as the parsimoniousness, elegance and descriptive and explana-
tory power of a theory.
To be sure, the classic pragmatic theories have spawned a range of approaches
that are firmly placed in cognitive-science and cognitive-linguistic frameworks.
These can indeed be considered as being distinctly cognitive-pragmatic, even
though this term has not been applied to them so far. The following survey does not
even try to do justice to this body of work, since this mission will be accomplished
by the chapters of the Handbook (which also include references to relevant publi-
cations):
–
Firstly, the rich body of experimental and theoretical publications by Herbert
Clark and his collaborators on a wide range of cognitive-pragmatic topics such
as common ground, shared knowledge, reference tracking, conversational col-
laboration and many others has to be mentioned here (cf. Chapter 13).
– Secondly, originally inspired by the claims made by Searle, Grice and others,
Seana Coulson, Raymond Gibbs, Rachel Giora, Sam Glucksberg, Anthony
Sanford and their collaborators have contributed substantially to our under-
standing of the construal of meaning-in-context through their work on the pro-
cessing of figurative, idiomatic, ironic, humorous and other non-literal uses of
language (cf. Chapters 9 and 17). This is complemented by the work by Lynn
Cameron, Alice Deignan and others on the discursive and pragmatic dimen-
sions of metaphor (cf. Chapter 16).
– Thirdly, the work by Suzanne Beeke, Dorothy Bishop, Louise Cummings, Da-
niela O’Neill, Ann Reboul and others in the field of developmental and clinical
pragmatics has been invaluable, not only for developing therapeutic strategies
for the treatment of cognitive-pragmatic deficits and developmental disorders,
but also for obtaining theoretical insights into pragmatic competence (cf.
Chapters 9, 10, 11 and 12).
– Fourthly, the substantial body of research into discourse processing, reference
tracking and inferencing associated with such names as Mira Ariel, Simon Gar-
rod, Morton Ann Gernsbacher, Art Graesser, Walter Kintsch, Ted Sanders, An-
thony Sanford and Rolf Zwaan covers an important dimension of pragmatic
processing, viz. the cognitive underpinnings of the way in which semantic and
pragmatic content are incrementally “put together” during the construal of
meaning-in-context (cf. Chapters 3 and 8).
– Fifthly, the term experimental pragmatics has entered the scene rather recently
(cf. Noveck and Sperber 2004), subsuming attempts to apply established ex-
perimental psycholinguistic and psychological methods to test theoretical
claims.
COMMUNICATIVE PRINCIPLE.
The communicative principle is . It has been the subject of much debate. Some possible bases for
the communicative principle include cooperation and relevance.
Some other principles of communication include:
• Clarity and conciseness
• Verbal and non-verbal communication
• Active listening
• Feedback and response
• Empathy and emotional intelligence
• Adaptability and flexibility
• Respect and open-mindedness
