Relevance Theory

Relevance Theory

1. Relevance theory is a framework for understanding utterance interpretation first proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson and used within cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. It was originally inspired by the work of H. Paul Grice and developed out of his ideas, but has since become a pragmatic framework in its own right.

2. Interpretation vs. Description

   • Echoic utterances: Sperber and Wilson distinguish the interpretive use of utterances from their descriptive use.
   • Literal and non-literal utterances: Just as quotations are not necessarily identical to the material they quote or interpret but only have to resemble it to some extent, an utterance need not be identical to the speaker's thought it interprets.
   • Irony: Relevance theory explains irony as an echoic utterance with implicit attribution and implicit attitude, the attitude being one of rejection, disapproval, ridicule, or the like.
   • Speech acts: Relevance theory only recognizes three types of generic, universal speech acts: saying (that), telling (to), and asking (whether).

3. Manifestness: A fact is manifest to an individual if he is capable of accepting it as true or probably true at the given time.

   • Cognitive environment: The set of all facts that are manifest to an individual. This comprises everything they can perceive, remember or infer, including facts they are not currently aware of.
     • Cognitive effect: An effect on an individual's cognitive environment triggered by "outside" information such as utterances directed at the individual. This includes addition of new facts or beliefs, as well as increase or decrease of the confidence in existing beliefs and their rejection, and the reorganization of information into schemas or maybe other structures to simplify subsequent processing.
       • Positive cognitive effect: A cognitive effect that is helpful rather than hindering for the individual

4. Relevance of a phenomenon

   • An utterance – or any other observed phenomenon – is relevant to an individual to the extent that its positive cognitive effects on the individual are large and the mental processing effort to achieve these effects is small.
   • Relevance is a comparative property: the more positive cognitive effects and the less processing effort, the more relevant

5. Inferences

   • Implicature: Further information, implicature in relevance theory
   • Real-time interpretation: The described process does not run in sequential order. An addressee of an utterance does not first decode it, then derive explicatures, then select implicated premises from his cognitive environment, and then derive implicated conclusions. Instead, all of these subtasks run in parallel, and each can aid in solving the others.