An Overview Of The Relevance Theory English Language Essay

An Overview Of The Relevance Theory English Language Essay In Relevance: Communication and cognition, Sperber and Wilson (1986, 1995) present a new approach to the study of human communication. Relevance Theory is based on the view that human cognition is geared towards the maximization of relevance, and that communicated information comes with a guarantee of relevance. This is what Sperber and Wilson name the Principle of Relevance. The theory has sparked a great deal of research since it was presented, either supporting or criticizing the entire theory or some of its main arguments. The following presents an overview of Relevance Theory (henceforth RT) and outlines the main tenets of the theory. The overview outlines definitions of the main concepts and tenets which were originally presented by Sperber and Wilson (1986; 1995) and mainly comprised the originality of the theory, such as mutual manifestness, optimal relevance, and ostensive inferential communication. That is followed by a discussion of RT as a post-Gricean theory and how far it adopts or deviates from the views of Grice (1975). Sperber and Wilson present RT as a post-Gricean theory (Grice 1975). It takes as a starting point the inferential model of communication developed by Grice as opposed to the code model of communication. Sperber and Wilson (1995) argue that communication cannot be achieved by the code model alone, i.e. encoding and decoding messages, nor by the inferential model alone. They maintain that verbal communication exploits both kinds of process, as the outcome of the decoding process serves as the input to the inferential process by which the speaker’s intentions are recognized. According to the code model of communication, human languages are codes and verbal communication is achieved by encoding and decoding messages. The speaker encodes his/her message into a signal which is decoded by the hearer. Grice (1975) developed a different model of communication which is the inferential model. According to that model, the speaker pro vides evidence of his/her intention to convey a specific meaning and the hearer infers that meaning according to the evidence provided. Following the inferential model, communication is successful when the hearer interprets the evidence provided by the speaker as she intended it to mean. In cases where a single utterance provides evidence for different interpretations, this could lead to communication failure if the speaker does not inferentially derive the meaning intended by the hearer. Grice suggested that a speaker would observe what he called the Co-operative Principle and maxims of conversation to make his/her communicative intention clear for the hearer who would choose the interpretation that conforms to these maxims. The maxims are Quality, Quantity, Relevance and Manner. Coded communication, as one of the processes involved in verbal communication is viewed by Sperber and Wilson not as autonomous but subservient to the inferential process. Nevertheless, the inferential pro cess is autonomous as it functions in essentially the same way whether or not combined with coded communication. Sperber and Wilson (1995) argue that the code model is not sufficient to account for human communication because comprehension of utterances involves more than merely decoding linguistic signals. There is a gap between the semantic representation of sentences and the thoughts which are actually communicated by the speaker’s utterances. They claim that this gap is filled by inference. Nevertheless, they argue that the inferential model is not enough on its own to explain human communication. As they reject the code model as insufficient to account for communicational understanding, Sperber and Wilson (1995) propose a modified view of inferential communication in which â€Å"communication is achieved by the communicator providing evidence of her intentions and the audience inferring her intentions from the evidence† (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 24). Hence, verbal communication involves both coding and inferential processes.