Aims

The main aim of this book is to provide an introduction to relevance theory. Relevance theory aims to describe and explain how humans understand the world and how we understand each other. In other words, it is a theory of both cognition and communication. In neither case, however, does the theory attempt to say all that there is to say about the phenomenon it aims to explain. On cognition, the theory makes a claim about how we allocate our cognitive resources in general but does not make specific claims about the majority of cognitive systems and processes. On communication, the theory makes a claim about how we use cognitive resources when we recognise that someone has openly produced an act of intentional communication, verbal or nonverbal, but it has less to say about covert or accidental forms of information transmission. In other words, relevance theory aims to tell part of the story of how we think and understand the world (cognition) and how we convey thoughts and understand each other (communication).

Relevance theory has been influential in a number of areas but it has arguably been most influential in the area of linguistic pragmatics, which aims to explain how we understand each other when we communicate in language. The book focuses mainly on linguistic communication but it also considers some cases of nonverbal communication, what the theory has to say about cognition more generally and the relationship between the accounts of cognition and of communication. While the explanation of communication presupposes assumptions about cognition, neither account fully depends on the other (one could be shown to be false while the other is broadly true, and vice versa). The book aims to explain the technical notion of ‘relevance’ assumed by the theory, the meaning of the claim that human cognition is ‘geared’ towards the maximisation of ‘relevance’, and the ways in which considerations of relevance guide the processes of human communication (for communicators and audiences).