Relevance Theory

Grice showed that in order to understand the meaning conveyed by a speaker with her utterance, the hearer must draw some inferences about the speaker&s;s intention. Relevance theory brings the Gricean agenda into the domain of cognitive science by claiming that the inferences needed for meaning elaboration are grounded in the general cognitive processes which govern all aspects of information processing. After a brief introduction to the most central claims in Grice&s;s account, we take a close look at the cognitive processes which can capture the inferential dimension of communication. In doing so, we discuss the key notion of relevance which defines a fundamental property of stimuli to cognitive processes. Through examples, the theoretical account is used to explain how a hearer can infer the (often implicit) meaning of an utterance. In the last part of this chapter, we show how relevance theory is equally well suited to capture other aspects of human communication like our ability to assess the quality of the information conveyed by an utterance, or in cases when communication combines verbal utterances with non-verbal stimuli to develop a form of multimodal communication.