Mrs Kerenimama

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RELEVANCE THEORY
Robyn Carston Linguistics, University College London CSMN, University of Oslo

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INTRODUCTION

Relevance theory (RT) is best known for its account of verbal communication and comprehension, but it also sets out a general picture of the principles driving the human cognitive system as a whole and this plays a crucial role in underpinning the particular claims made about communication and the pragmatic theory that follows from them. The various post-Gricean accounts of the principles and processes that mediate the gap between sentence meaning and speaker meaning can be divided broadly into three classes based on their orientation: linguistic, philosophical and cognitive-scientific. Linguisticallyoriented theories tend to focus on those pragmatic processes which are the least contextsensitive and most code-like, reflecting default or general patterns of language use (Levinson 2000; Horn 1984, 2004). Philosophically-oriented accounts tend to follow Grice closely in maintaining his system of conversational norms and providing rational reconstructions of the ‘conversational logic’ that delivers speakers’ implicated meaning (Neale 1993, chapter 3; Recanati 2001, 2004). Given its cognitive-scientific orientation, relevance theory pragmatics is concerned with the on-line processes of utterance interpretation and the nature of the mental system(s) responsible for them (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995a, Wilson and Sperber 2004). So it is responsive to research in evolutionary psychology on the nature of human cognitive architecture, empirical work on children’s communicative development and experimental measures of adults’ on-line comprehension, investigations into the relation between pragmatic competence and theory of mind (the ability to attribute intentions and beliefs to others), and clinical studies of people with impaired communicative capacities. For a survey of the ways in which Relevance Theory engages with these issues, see Wilson and

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(2008) Occasion-Sensitivity: Selected Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, D. (2005) “New Directions for Research on Pragmatics and Modularity,” Lingua 115: 1129-1146. Wilson, D. and Carston, R. (2007) “A Unitary Approach to Lexical Pragmatics: Relevance, Inference and Ad Hoc Concepts,” in N. Burton-Roberts (ed.) Advances in Pragmatics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 230-260. Wilson, D. and Sperber, D. (2002) “Truthfulness and Relevance,” Mind 111: 583-632. Wilson, D. and Sperber, D. (2004) “Relevance Theory,” in L. Horn and G. Ward (eds) The Handbook of Pragmatics, Oxford: Blackwell, 607-632. 20 Biographical Note Robyn Carston is Professor of Linguistics at University College London. She works on the semantics/pragmatics distinction, the explicit/implicit communication distinction and the interpretation of metaphor. She has published Thoughts and Utterances (2002, Blackwell) and a collection of her papers Pragmatics and Semantic Content is forthcoming (Oxford University Press).