Course: Semantics and Pragmatics

By: Um-e-Laila

Topic: Relevance theory and implicating distinction.

Definition and origin:

Relevance theory is a framework for understanding the interpretation of utterances. It was

Basis :Grice’s maxims

Relevance theory is 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.

Relevance theory and communication:

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.

Borderline between semantics and pragmatics:

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.

Examples:

Here are some examples to illustrate the concept of relevance. If Alice and Bob are planning to go on a
trip next weekend and Alice tells Bob

(1) Next weekend the weather will be really awful.

This is highly relevant to Bob, as he can draw a host of conclusions, modifying his cognitive environment:
Alice wants them to rethink their plans and wants to inform Bob of this wish; Bob agrees – or doesn’t
agree and just wants to bring oilskins; Alice wants to know Bob’s opinion on that matter; etc. By
contrast, saying

(2) The weather was really awful on 19 October 1974 in Cumbria.

Makes just one piece of new, unrelated information manifest to Bob, and is thus hardly relevant; and

(3) The weather is really awful right now.

Is not relevant as it doesn’t tell Bob anything new; he has already seen for himself. Finally, the sentence

(4) On the weekend 2473 weeks after 19 October 1974 the weather will be really awful.
Contains exactly the same information as (1) but requires more effort to process, and is thus less
relevant under this definition.

Principles:

The first or cognitive principle of relevance says that human cognition tends to be geared to the
maximisation of relevance. Historically, evolutionary pressure has resulted in cognitive systems that
recognise potentially relevant stimuli and try to draw relevant conclusions.[8]

More importantly for the issue at hand, the second or communicative principle of relevance says that
every utterance conveys the information that it is

a. relevant enough for it to be worth the addressee’s effort to process it. (If the utterance contained too
few positive cognitive effects for the addressee in relation to the processing effort needed to achieve
these effects, he wouldn’t bother processing it, and the communicator needn’t have taken the trouble
to utter it.)

b. the most relevant one compatible with the communicator’s abilities and preferences. (Otherwise the
communicator would have chosen a more relevant utterance – e.g. one that needs less processing effort
and/or achieves more positive cognitive effects on part of the addressee – to convey her meaning. After
all, she wants to be understood as easily and reliably as possible.

This principle is summed up as “Every utterance conveys a presumption of its own optimal relevance”. If
Alice tells Bob something – anything –, he is entitled to expect that Alice wanted her utterance to be
consistent with the communicative principle of relevance. Consequently, if Alice tells Bob something
that does not seem to be worth his processing effort, such as sentences (2) or (3) above, or something
that seems to be less relevant than Alice could have put it, such as (4), Bob will automatically search for
an alternative interpretation. The most easily accessible interpretation that is consistent with the
communicative principle of relevance is the one Bob accepts as the right one, and then he stops
processing (because any further interpretations would cost him more processing effort and would thus
violate condition b).The constraint that utterances are compatible with the communicator’s abilities and
preferences accounts for suboptimal communication, such as when the communicator is unable to think
of a better phrasing at the moment, as well as for stylistic and cultural preferences (e.g. politeness
considerations), withholding information, and lying.

Conclusion:

Thus, relevance theory is based on Grice maxim of relevance . It implicates distinctions between the
utterances and marked a clear difference between semantic and pragmatic levels of utterances.