"The theory was first proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson."
The study of how communication is designed to achieve relevance between speakers and listeners.
Significance of Pragmatics: Understanding pragmatics in linguistic and communicative systems.
Pragmatic Approaches: Various pragmatics approaches including Grice's maxims, speech-act theory, and relevance theory and their importance in understanding relevance theory.
Relevance Theory: An introduction to the founder's perspective of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's Relevance Theory, which provides the guidelines for the processing of communicated information.
Linguistic Communication and Relevance Theory: Relevance Theory's approach in determining an informatively adequate interpretation of a message by processing the communicative intentions of the speaker.
Language Context and Relevance Theory: Understanding the role of context in the processing of communicative messages.
Mental Representations and Mental Context: Understanding the concept of mutual contextual pressure in Relevance Theory and the importance of mental representations of speakers to achieve communicative goals.
Cognitive Processing and Interpretation: Understanding the different levels of cognitive processing and interpretation in Relevance Theory in relation to contextual information.
Irony, Metaphors, and Indirectness: The processing of these different forms of speech which pose a challenge to interpreting meaning accurately, by understanding the constraints of a contextual perspective.
Pragmatics and Syntax: Understanding the importance of pragmatics in determining an interpretation of syntactic messages.
Communication and Rationality: The importance of communication rationality according to Relevance Theory which deals with the joint attention of all participants to convey and understand the communicated messages.
General Relevance Theory: A general framework that explains how linguistic utterances convey meaning and how hearers arrive at an interpretation of the speaker's intended meaning.
Explicit vs. Implicit Relevance: The distinction between direct, explicit relevance and indirect, implicit relevance, where the latter relies on contextual factors beyond the explicit meaning of the utterance.
Strong vs. Weak Relevance: The distinction between strong relevance, where contextual information is necessary for interpretation, and weak relevance, where contextual information is not necessary.
Global vs. Local Relevance: The distinction between the relevance of individual linguistic units and the overall relevance of whole texts or conversations.
Intentional vs. Non-Intentional Relevance: The distinction between relevance that arises from the speaker's intentional communication and relevance that arises from the hearer's own interests, context, or goals.
Shared vs. Private Knowledge Relevance: The distinction between relevance that arises from common knowledge or beliefs shared by speakers and hearers and relevance that arises from private knowledge or beliefs of only one or some of them.
Direct vs. Indirect Relevance: The distinction between relevance that is directly relevant to the truth of an utterance and relevance that is only indirectly related to its truth.
"The theory is a framework for understanding the interpretation of utterances."
"It is used within cognitive linguistics and pragmatics."
"The theory was originally inspired by the work of Paul Grice and developed out of his ideas."
"The seminal book, Relevance, was first published in 1986 and revised in 1995."
"The principle that 'every utterance conveys the information that it is relevant enough for it to be worth the addressee's effort to process it.'"
"It means that the utterance is compatible with the communicator's abilities and preferences."
"Utterances are ostensive (they draw their addressees' attention to the fact that the communicator wants to convey some information) and inferential (the addressee has to infer what the communicator wanted to convey)."
"Inferences that are intended by the communicator are categorized into explicatures and implicatures."
"The explicatures of an utterance are what is explicitly said, often supplemented with contextual information."
"Thus, 'Susan told me that her kiwis were too sour' might, under certain circumstances, explicate 'Susan told the speaker that the kiwifruit she, Susan, grew were too sour for the judges at the fruit grower's contest'."
"Implicatures are conveyed without actually stating them."
"The above utterance might, for example, implicate 'Susan needs to be cheered up' and 'The speaker wants the addressee to ring Susan and cheer her up'."
"Relevance Theory also attempts to explain figurative language such as hyperbole, metaphor, and irony."
"Critics have stated that relevance, in the specialized sense used in this theory, is not defined well enough to be measured."
"Other criticisms include that the theory is too reductionist to account for the large variety of pragmatic phenomena."