Relevance Theory has been applied in a wide range of areas, including accounts of reasoning in general, developmental psychology, and the understanding of conditions such as autistic spectrum disorders. The majority of relevance-theoretic work has been concerned with developing accounts of linguistically encoded meanings (linguistic semantics) and how these interact with contextual assumptions in understanding utterances (pragmatics). pragmatics concerns itself with phenomena relating to language use and interpersonal communication Pragmatics is an aspect of the study of language in use. It is concerned with how language users interact, communicate and interpret each other’s' linguistic behaviour. Literary stylistics is the study of how close attention to language use can contribute to accounts of how texts are understood and evaluated. semantics is concerned with the meaning and interpretation of language. Accounting for interpretations is a key focus of work in stylistics, so it is natural that relevance-theoretic ideas have been applied to stylistics, providing accounts of particular texts and of particular phenomena involved in the production and comprehension of texts. the aim is not to provide particular interpretations or evaluations, but to explain the processes involved in arriving at these. Overview: From Grice to relevance theory relevance theory retains the broadly Gricean view that pragmatic principles, grounded in rationality, guide the interpretation of utterances (Premise) Gricean pragmatics does not purport to describe how hearers actually work out (or reason their way to) the speaker's meaning, but merely how they might do so. (Conclusion) Gricean pragmatics does not purport to explain how interpretation actually works, but merely how it might work. Relevance theory departs from Grice in not assuming ‘maxim-like’ principles 1. Example of Maxim Principles – The maxim of quantity, where one tries to be as informative as one possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed, and no more.] The maxim of quality, where one tries to be truthful, and does not give information that is false or that is not supported by evidence. The maxim of relation, where one tries to be relevant, and says things that are pertinent to the discussion. The maxim of manner, when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity. Relevance is usually defined as a potential property of inputs (such as assumptions, thoughts, utterances) to cognitive processes. Relevance theory claims that linguistic communication (and, in fact, all human communication) is relevance driven. Relevance is defined within this framework as a trade-off of two competing factors: cognitive or contextual effects and processing effort. A positive cognitive effect is ‘a worthwhile difference to the individual’s representation of the world’ (Wilson and Sperber 2004: 608), such as a true belief or conclusion. According to relevance theory, an input is relevant to an individual just in case positive cognitive effects result from the processing of that input. Principles Cognitive principle of relevance- Relevance theory claims that the more cognitive effects a stimulus (“text”) has, the more relevant it is. Seeing a tiger in the garden gives rise to more cognitive effects than seeing a robin so this is a more relevant stimulus. human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance "The more cognitive effects a stimulus has, the more relevant it is. But we can assess relevance not only in terms of the number of effects derivable from a stimulus. Processing effort also plays a role. Sperber and Wilson claim that the more mental effort involved in processing a stimulus the less relevant it is Communicative principle of relevance- the communication process involves not only encoding, transfer, and decoding of messages, but also numerous other elements, including inference and context. Processing new information in a context may yield three main types of positive cognitive effect. First, it may yield a contextual implication deducible from the combination of new and existing assumptions, but from neither of these alone. Second, it may provide evidence that strengthens an already existing assumption. Third, it may contradict and eliminate information already held. Processing effort, on the other hand, is the effort of perception, memory and inference that must be expended in computing cognitive effects. For instance, an utterance of a wordy and syntactically complex sentence would take more effort to process than an utterance of a less wordy and simpler version of that sentence. Likewise, an indirect answer to a question would require more processing effort than a direct one. Example: (A); It’s very hot here (B): Opens the window (2) Andy: Has Colin brought that book back yet? Beth: He’ll be round later. (3) Andy: I think the last bus has gone. Will you get home, OK? Beth: [points to her bicycle helmet in the corner of the room] In (2), Andy has to work out that he refers to Colin and that the intended sense of round is one which means that Colin will be visiting later (rather than that he will be spherical). Relevance theory assumes that these are inferred in the light of accessible contextual assumptions and constrained by (relevance-theoretic) pragmatic principles. Equally, Andy’s interpretation of Beth’s nonverbal behavior in (3) is guided by pragmatics and accessible contextual assumptions (key ones here being about Andy’s expectation of an answer to the question he has just asked). Critical issues and topics This section provides a very brief overview of key relevance-theoretic ideas. Relevance theory assumes that a ‘Relevance-Guided Comprehension Heuristic’ is triggered by the recognition of an ostensive stimulus, i.e. by an action clearly intended to communicate something. The heuristic is stated as follows: (Heuristics have been defined as learned knowledge or stored memory that facilitates a relatively intuitive judgment process requiring minimal cognitive demand) Relevance-Guided Comprehension Heuristic a. Follow a path of least effort in deriving cognitive effects: test interpretations (disambiguations, reference resolutions, implicatures, etc.) in order of accessibility. b. Stop when your expectations of relevance are satisfied. When we recognize an ostensive stimulus, we follow a path of least effort in looking for an interpretation (‘deriving cognitive effects’) and stop when our expectations of relevance are met. So what are our expectations of relevance? The claim is that an act of ostensive communication creates a presumption that the communicator thinks it will be worth our while to pay attention and to put in the effort required to process it. More precisely, the communicator must think that interpreting this stimulus will be more worthwhile than processing any other stimulus which we could pay attention to instead. We can see how this works informally by considering again example (3) above, where Beth points in the direction of her bicycle helmet. Beth must think that it is worth Andy’s while to process her stimulus. In this situation, Andy will expect Beth’s pointing to have something to do with his question about her getting home. As soon as Andy spots the helmet and makes the necessary inferences about Beth planning to cycle home, he will have arrived at an interpretation which meets his expectations. To understand this more formally, we need to understand the technical definition of the term ‘relevance’ and the nature of the ‘expectations of relevance’ mentioned above. Relevance theory does not claim that interpreters assume that utterances are as relevant as possible. Rather, the Communicative Principle of Relevance states that they assume that the act is ‘optimally relevant’, i.e. that it provides enough effects to justify the effort involved and does not require unjustified effort. Following the relevance-guided comprehension heuristic, then, a hearer moves along a path of least effort, accessing contextual assumptions, testing hypotheses about intended senses and referents, possible implicatures and so on, looking for an interpretation which the communicator could have intended to give rise to enough effects to justify the effort involved in deriving them. As soon as he finds such an interpretation (or until he gives up, if he cannot fi nd one), he stops. Accounting for individual texts The impracticality of attempting to account for every inferential process involved in analyzing particular texts follows from the large amount of time and space needed to explain even fairly straightforward everyday inferential processes. (11) I was tired. An account of how this utterance is understood in a particular context will have to include at least an account of how the interpreter works out: (12) Andy: Did you not put the bins out last night? Beth: I was tired. The key here is for Andy to access the strongest implicature (that Beth is suggesting that her tiredness explains her not having put the bins out). Another key point to notice is how much I have written without yet providing a full account of how this utterance is understood. Now imagine that the words from Beth’s utterance (12) appear as the opening sentence of a novel. The complexity of the inferential processes is much greater. The reader might not be able to work out the referent of I at this stage, but he or she will assume that this can be fleshed out later. Confidence in reference assignment will depend on the availability of other contextual assumptions, e.g. the reader might know that the book is a first-person narrative about a particular character. Other inferential processes might reflect assumptions or expectations created by what the reader knows about the author, the book (e.g. whether it is thought of as ‘popular’ writing, a ‘literary’ text, etc.) and so on. Of course, novels and many other texts have more than one reader. Another task for stylistics is to explore how different readers respond differently to particular texts. This vastly increases the task of accounting for inferences associated with texts Salient inferences One situation in which inferential processes are worth investigating is where audiences become more aware than usual of the inferential processes, they are engaged in. This applies to jokes, creative uses of everyday language and literary texts. Example: A man is driving a truck down the motorway when he sees some wild monkeys playing by the side of the road. He gathers them into his truck and drives on. A police officer spots him and forces him to stop. The driver explains what has happened and asks the policeman what to do. ‘I think you’d better take them to the zoo,’ suggests the police officer. The man agrees. The next day, the same police officer sees the same driver in the same truck still carrying the same group of monkeys. He stops the truck again. ‘What are you doing with the monkeys?’ asks the police officer. ‘I thought you were taking them to the zoo.’ ‘Yes,’ replies the driver. ‘I took them there yesterday. They loved it. Today I’m taking them to the seaside’ Metarepresentation Metarepresentation is an important notion in human cognition and communication, and one which is often seen as closely connected with the evolution of human language and communication (see, for example, Sperber 2000). It refers to the ability to embed representations within other representations (e.g. representing a thought as being entertained by someone else, as in Dave thinks that Emma thinks that... ) Several aspects of individual communicative acts can be understood as involving metarepresentation. These include understanding utterances as attributed to others, as in (13), ironic utterances such as (14) and the complexities involved in understanding fictional ‘layering’ as in (15) and (16): (13) Andy: What did Colin say? Beth: He’s tired and doesn’t want to go out tonight. (14) Andy: The government has announced that it’s revising the whole education system from top to bottom. Beth: Teachers will love that. (15) I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbors that I shall be troubled with In (13), Beth is communicating that Colin has said that he’s tired and doesn’t want to go out. In (14) Beth is dissociating herself from the thought that teachers will love the government announcement, which she finds ridiculous. In (15) Emily Brontë is presenting the narrator Mr. Lockwood’s utterance Decoupled representations are separated from those associated with ‘architectural truth’. To take a simple example discussed by MacMahon (2009a, p. 527), suppose I think that: (17) My daughter believes fairies exist. I can entertain this proposition without believing the embedded and attributed proposition that: (18) Fairies exist. However, I can still draw conclusions from (18) and work out other things which my daughter might believe. This is, then, a ‘decoupled’ proposition since I can represent it and derive inferences from it without believing that it is true.
