Précis of Relevance: Communication and Cognition

Abstract

In Relevance: Communication and Cognition, we outline a new approach to the study of human communication, one based on a general view of human cognition. Attention and thought processes, we argue, automatically turn toward information that seems relevant: that is, capable of yielding cognitive effects-the more, and the more economically, the greater the relevance. We analyse both the nature of cognitive effects and the inferential processes by which they are derived. Communication can be achieved by two different means: by encoding and decoding messages or by providing evidence for an intended inference about the communicator's informative intention. Verbal communication, we argue, exploits both types of process. The linguistic meaning of an utterance, recovered by specialised decoding processes, serves as the input to unspecialised central inferential processes by which the speaker's intentions are recognised. Fundamental to our account of inferential communication is the fact that to communicate is to claim someone's attention, and hence to imply that the information communicated is relevant. We call this idea, that communicated information comes with a guarantee of relevance, the principle of relevance. We show that every utterance has at most a single interpretation consistent with the principle of relevance, which is thus enough on its own to account for the interaction of linguistic meaning with contextual factors in disambiguation, reference assignment, the recovery of implicatures, the interpretation of metaphor and irony, the recovery of illocutionary force, and other linguistically underdetermined aspects of utterance interpretation.

Online interpretation of scalar quantifiers: Insight into the semantics–pragmatics interface

“…One hypothesis is that pragmatic interpretations, like scalar implicatures, generally occur by default unless otherwise cancelled by the context (Levinson, 2000). Others argue that all pragmatic interpretations, including implicatures, are constructed with reference to the global situation, rejecting notions of default inferences (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). While our study was not specifically designed to distinguish these two accounts, features of our data are compatible with predictions that each might make about language processing.…”

Towards a unified science of cultural evolution

“…This has parallels with Sperber and Wilson's (1986) relevance theory of language use, in which utterances are tailored to be maximally relevant to the intended target, and also Gergely and Csibra's (2006) studies of pedagogical learning, in which human infants and adults have been found to exhibit species-specific cognitive adaptations to facilitate high-fidelity cultural transmission of behaviour when the efficacy or functional relevance of the behaviour is unclear. Chimpanzees have been found to have a contrasting tendency to preferentially acquire only those modelled actions that are functionally relevant to solving a task .…”

Children's command of quantification

“…These findings come from a set of studies designed to investigate children's sensitivity to a class of conversational inferences known as scalar implicatures (Carston, 1998;Gazdar, 1979;Grice, 1989;Harnish, 1976;Hirschberg, 1985;Horn, 1972;Levinson, 2000;Sperber & Wilson, 1995; among many others). Scalar implicatures arise in examples like Some students can write well where the speaker's use of some typically indicates that s/he had reasons not to use a more informative term, e.g.…”