Relevance theory
Encyclopedia
Relevance theory is a proposal by Dan Sperber
and Deirdre Wilson that seeks to explain the second method of communication: one that takes into account implicit inference
s. It argues that the hearer/reader/audience will search for meaning in any given communication situation and having found meaning that fits their expectation of relevance
, will stop processing.
Speaker's thought/intention ⇒ encoded ⇒ transmitted ⇒ decoded ⇒ intention/thought understood.
This is usually referred to as the code model or the conduit metaphor of communication.
Human communication however, is almost never this simple. Context almost always plays a part in communication as do other factors such as the author's intentions, the relationship between the sender and receiver and so forth.
The second way of conceiving how thoughts are communicated is by the author/speaker only conveying as much information as is needed in any given context, so that the audience can recover their intended meaning from what was said/written as well as from the context and implications. In this conceptual model, the author takes into account the context of the communication and the mutual cognitive environment between the author and the audience. (That is what the author/speaker thinks that audience already knows). They then say just enough to communicate what they intend - relying on the audience to fill in the details that they did not explicitly communicate. This can be visualized as follows:
Speaker's thought/intention ± context-mediated information ⇒ encoded ⇒ transmitted ⇒ decoded ± context-mediated information ⇒ thought/intention understood by hearer (an interpretive resemblance to the speaker's intention).
Mary: How many loaves of bread do we have?
Bill: five.
Bill did not say "five loaves". He also did not say "five loaves of bread". Both are implied with his reply. But both are somewhat redundant. What Bill said was just enough to understand his meaning. Mary fills in the missing context-mediated information, i.e. that the question was about loaves of bread and not about something else. She understands that they have five loaves of bread from Bill's one word answer.
Here is another slightly harder example:
Mary: Would you like to come for a run?
Bill: I'm resting today.
We understand from this example that Bill does not want to go for a run. But that is not what he said. He only said enough for Mary to add the context-mediated information: i.e. someone who is resting doesn't usually go for a run. The implication is that Bill doesn't want to go for a run today.
These examples illustrate an important point: Speech radically under-determines thought. So what we say (write etc.) is small compared to the thoughts it provokes.
theories. Namely, it argues that all utterance
s are encountered in some context and that utterances convey a number of implicature
s. In addition, they posit the notion of manifestness, which is when something is grasped either consciously or unconsciously by a person.
They further note that it will be manifest to people who are engaged in inferential communication that each other have the notion of relevance in their minds. This will cause each person engaged in the interaction to arrive at the presumption of relevance, which is the notion that (a) implicit messages are relevant enough to be worth bothering to process, and (b) the speaker will be as economical as they possibly can be in communicating it.
The core of the theory is the “communicative principle of relevance”, which states that by the act of making an utterance the speaker is conveying that what they have said is worth listening to, i.e. it will provide "cognitive effects" worthy of the processing effort required to find the meaning. In this way, every ostensive act of communication (that is the lexical "clues" that are explicitly conveyed when we speak/write) will look something like this:
1. The speaker purposefully gives a clue to the hearer, ("ostensifies"), as to what she wishes to communicate - that is a clue to her intention.
2. The hearer infers the intention from the clue and the context-mediated information. The hearer must interpret the clue, taking into account the context, and surmise what the speaker intended to communicate.
For Sperber and Wilson, relevance is conceived as relative or subjective, as it depends upon the state of knowledge of a hearer when they encounter an utterance. However, they are quick to note that their theory does not attempt to exhaustively define the concept of "relevance" in everyday use, but tries to show an interesting and important part of human communication, in particular ostensive-inferential communication.
Encoding
Deriving/Entailment
Deriving/Implying
Dan Sperber
Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology and linguistic pragmatics: developing, with British psychologist Deirdre Wilson, relevance theory in the latter; and an approach to cultural evolution known as the...
and Deirdre Wilson that seeks to explain the second method of communication: one that takes into account implicit inference
Inference
Inference is the act or process of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true. The conclusion drawn is also called an idiomatic. The laws of valid inference are studied in the field of logic.Human inference Inference is the act or process of deriving logical conclusions...
s. It argues that the hearer/reader/audience will search for meaning in any given communication situation and having found meaning that fits their expectation of relevance
Relevance
-Introduction:The concept of relevance is studied in many different fields, including cognitive sciences, logic and library and information science. Most fundamentally, however, it is studied in epistemology...
, will stop processing.
Relevance theory contrasted with the Conduit Metaphor
There are two ways to conceive of how thoughts are communicated from one person to another. The first way is through the use of strict coding and decoding, (such as is used with Morse code). In this approach the speaker/author encodes their thoughts and transmits them to their audience. The audience receives the encoded message and decodes it to arrive at the meaning the speaker/author intended. This can be visualized as follows:Speaker's thought/intention ⇒ encoded ⇒ transmitted ⇒ decoded ⇒ intention/thought understood.
This is usually referred to as the code model or the conduit metaphor of communication.
Human communication however, is almost never this simple. Context almost always plays a part in communication as do other factors such as the author's intentions, the relationship between the sender and receiver and so forth.
The second way of conceiving how thoughts are communicated is by the author/speaker only conveying as much information as is needed in any given context, so that the audience can recover their intended meaning from what was said/written as well as from the context and implications. In this conceptual model, the author takes into account the context of the communication and the mutual cognitive environment between the author and the audience. (That is what the author/speaker thinks that audience already knows). They then say just enough to communicate what they intend - relying on the audience to fill in the details that they did not explicitly communicate. This can be visualized as follows:
Speaker's thought/intention ± context-mediated information ⇒ encoded ⇒ transmitted ⇒ decoded ± context-mediated information ⇒ thought/intention understood by hearer (an interpretive resemblance to the speaker's intention).
Examples
Here is a simple example:Mary: How many loaves of bread do we have?
Bill: five.
Bill did not say "five loaves". He also did not say "five loaves of bread". Both are implied with his reply. But both are somewhat redundant. What Bill said was just enough to understand his meaning. Mary fills in the missing context-mediated information, i.e. that the question was about loaves of bread and not about something else. She understands that they have five loaves of bread from Bill's one word answer.
Here is another slightly harder example:
Mary: Would you like to come for a run?
Bill: I'm resting today.
We understand from this example that Bill does not want to go for a run. But that is not what he said. He only said enough for Mary to add the context-mediated information: i.e. someone who is resting doesn't usually go for a run. The implication is that Bill doesn't want to go for a run today.
These examples illustrate an important point: Speech radically under-determines thought. So what we say (write etc.) is small compared to the thoughts it provokes.
Overview
Sperber and Wilson’s theory begins with some watershed assumptions that are typical of pragmaticPragmatics
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the...
theories. Namely, it argues that all utterance
Utterance
In spoken language analysis an utterance is a complete unit of speech. It is generally but not always bounded by silence.It can be represented and delineated in written language in many ways. Note that in such areas of research utterances do not exist in written language, only their representations...
s are encountered in some context and that utterances convey a number of implicature
Implicature
Implicature is a technical term in the pragmatics subfield of linguistics, coined by H. P. Grice, which refers to what is suggested in an utterance, even though neither expressed nor strictly implied by the utterance...
s. In addition, they posit the notion of manifestness, which is when something is grasped either consciously or unconsciously by a person.
They further note that it will be manifest to people who are engaged in inferential communication that each other have the notion of relevance in their minds. This will cause each person engaged in the interaction to arrive at the presumption of relevance, which is the notion that (a) implicit messages are relevant enough to be worth bothering to process, and (b) the speaker will be as economical as they possibly can be in communicating it.
The core of the theory is the “communicative principle of relevance”, which states that by the act of making an utterance the speaker is conveying that what they have said is worth listening to, i.e. it will provide "cognitive effects" worthy of the processing effort required to find the meaning. In this way, every ostensive act of communication (that is the lexical "clues" that are explicitly conveyed when we speak/write) will look something like this:
1. The speaker purposefully gives a clue to the hearer, ("ostensifies"), as to what she wishes to communicate - that is a clue to her intention.
2. The hearer infers the intention from the clue and the context-mediated information. The hearer must interpret the clue, taking into account the context, and surmise what the speaker intended to communicate.
For Sperber and Wilson, relevance is conceived as relative or subjective, as it depends upon the state of knowledge of a hearer when they encounter an utterance. However, they are quick to note that their theory does not attempt to exhaustively define the concept of "relevance" in everyday use, but tries to show an interesting and important part of human communication, in particular ostensive-inferential communication.
Formalization
Relevance Theory's central insights are formalized in the following two-part principle, the Presumption of Optimal Relevance (see Postface to Sperber and Wilson 1995, p. 270):- The ostensive stimulus is relevant enough for it to be worth the addressee's effort to process it.
- The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator's abilities and preferences.
Terminology
- Sentence
- Sentence Utterance
- Sentence Sense
- Logical Form
- ExplicatureExplicatureExplicature is a technical term in pragmatics, the branch of linguistics that concerns the meaning given to an utterance by its context. The explicature of a sentence is what is explicitly said, as opposed to the implicature, the information that the speaker conveys implicitly.The truth value of a...
- Contextually Enriched Logical Form
- Fully Propositional Logical Form
- Truth-Conditional Proposition
- Explicit Proposition
- Explicated Proposition
- ImplicatureImplicatureImplicature is a technical term in the pragmatics subfield of linguistics, coined by H. P. Grice, which refers to what is suggested in an utterance, even though neither expressed nor strictly implied by the utterance...
- Implicit Proposition
- Implicated Proposition
Encoding
- A sentence encodes a set of sentence senses.
Deriving/Entailment
Entailment
In logic, entailment is a relation between a set of sentences and a sentence. Let Γ be a set of one or more sentences; let S1 be the conjunction of the elements of Γ, and let S2 be a sentence: then, Γ entails S2 if and only if S1 and not-S2 are logically inconsistent...
- A set of sentence senses entail a contextually enriched logical form.
Deriving/Implying
- An explicit proposition implies implicit propositions.
Further reading
- Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. (1987) Precis of Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 10, 697-754.
- Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. (2004) "Relevance Theory" in G. Ward and L. Horn (eds) Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell, 607-632. http://www.dan.sperber.fr/?p=93