You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Relevance Theory was developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in their groundbreaking book Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1986, with a substantially revised second edition in 1995). It is the most influential post-Gricean development in pragmatics — built on Grice's foundations but proposing to replace his whole apparatus of maxims with a single, cognitively grounded principle. Where Grice located meaning in social cooperation and the (non-)observance of conversational rules, Sperber and Wilson locate it in the architecture of the human mind itself: communication works, they argue, because cognition is built to seek relevance. For AQA A-Level, Relevance Theory provides a second analytical lens to set alongside Grice, and — just as importantly — knowing where and why the two frameworks diverge is precisely the kind of theoretical, evaluative engagement that the higher mark bands reward. These methods are integrated across Paper 1, Paper 2 and the NEA, serve AO1 directly, and feed AO2 and AO3 when you weigh competing theories against real data.
Sperber and Wilson took Grice's central insight — that listeners infer meaning beyond the literal — and accepted it wholeheartedly. Their quarrel was with the machinery Grice used to explain it. They identified several problems:
Their radical response: relevance alone can do everything the four maxims were meant to do. The four maxims are dissolved into a single governing principle.
Sperber and Wilson give relevance a precise, two-factor definition. An input (an utterance, a thought, a sight, a sound) is relevant to an individual to the extent that it produces cognitive effects for that individual, and the more effects it produces and the less effort it costs, the more relevant it is.
An input is relevant when it interacts with the individual's existing assumptions (their cognitive environment) to yield a cognitive effect. There are three types:
The third type — contextual implication — is the most important, because it is genuinely new information generated by the interaction of utterance and context, and it is where the richest cognitive effects lie.
Key Definition: Cognitive effects (contextual effects) — the changes to an individual's set of assumptions produced by processing an input in context: strengthening, eliminating, or (most importantly) combining to yield new contextual implications. More cognitive effects mean greater relevance.
Processing effort is the mental cost of representing and interpreting an input. Effort is increased by linguistic complexity, ambiguity, obscure vocabulary, unfamiliar reference, a hard-to-access context, or physical noise. All else being equal, the more effort an input demands, the less relevant it is.
Key Definition: Processing effort — the mental energy required to perceive, decode and infer the meaning of an input. Greater effort lowers relevance, all else being equal.
Relevance is therefore a cost-benefit trade-off between effects (the benefit) and effort (the cost):
This is why a needlessly convoluted way of saying a simple thing reduces relevance even if the content is identical: the extra effort is not repaid by extra effects.
It helps to be clear that Sperber and Wilson use "relevant" in two related ways, and keeping them distinct prevents loose writing. In the classificatory sense, an input either is or is not relevant to an individual at all: it is relevant if it produces any cognitive effect, and irrelevant if it produces none (a remark about the cricket score, dropped into a discussion of tax policy with no connecting assumptions available, may simply yield no effect and so be irrelevant). In the comparative sense, inputs are relevant to degrees: among inputs that are relevant at all, one is more relevant than another if it yields more cognitive effects, or yields them for less processing effort, or both. Most analysis trades on the comparative sense — we are usually asking not whether an utterance is relevant but why this interpretation of it is the most relevant available. Using the vocabulary precisely ("the literal reading is relevant but only trivially so; the inferred reading is far more relevant because it yields a substantial contextual implication") signals real command of the theory.
Sperber and Wilson model the derivation of cognitive effects as a kind of spontaneous, non-demonstrative inference: the mind combines the newly decoded assumption with selected contextual assumptions and computes the implications that follow. This is why the third type of cognitive effect — the contextual implication — is genuinely new knowledge: it is deduced from the union of utterance and context, and could not have been reached from either premise alone. Consider being told, as you wait at a bus stop, "The last bus has gone." Combined with your existing assumption "If the last bus has gone, I must walk or get a taxi", this yields, by a simple inferential step, the new conclusion "I must walk or get a taxi" — a contextual implication that motivates action. The utterance is relevant exactly because it feeds this inference. When you analyse why an utterance "matters" to a hearer, you are really reconstructing the contextual assumptions it combines with and the implications it thereby yields — and spelling out that inferential chain is a precise, rigorous way to demonstrate the cognitive effects the theory talks about.
Sperber and Wilson distinguish two principles — and confusing them is a common error, so keep them apart.
"Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance."
This is a claim about the mind in general: our perceptual and inferential systems are biased, by their very design, to allocate attention to the most relevant available stimuli and to process them as efficiently as possible. It is not specifically about communication at all — it is about how cognition works.
"Every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance."
This is a claim about communication specifically: the very act of deliberately and overtly communicating something carries with it a guarantee — a presumption of optimal relevance — that the message is worth the audience's processing effort and is the most relevant one the communicator was willing and able to produce. This single principle replaces Grice's Cooperative Principle and all four maxims at a stroke. A speaker need not separately undertake to be truthful, informative, relevant and clear; by communicating at all, they automatically vouch that the effort of interpretation will be repaid.
Key Definition: The Communicative Principle of Relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995) — every act of ostensive (overt, intentional) communication carries a presumption that it is optimally relevant: relevant enough to be worth processing, and the most relevant the communicator could and would produce.
Sperber and Wilson reject the simple code model of communication (the idea that speakers merely encode thoughts into words which hearers decode back into thoughts). Decoding the linguistic signal only gets you part-way; the rest is inference. They describe communication as ostensive-inferential, with two interlocking sides.
The speaker produces a stimulus — an utterance, a gesture, a glance, a written text — deliberately designed to attract attention and convey meaning. It is ostensive: overt, intentional, and meant to be recognised as intentional. Sperber and Wilson analyse this in terms of two layered intentions:
The hearer takes the ostensive stimulus and:
That stopping rule is the operational heart of the theory — and it explains why misunderstandings happen when the speaker misjudges which interpretation will be most accessible to the hearer.
Because comprehension follows least effort and halts at the first relevant-enough reading, the theory neatly explains several everyday phenomena that Grice handled only loosely.
Where a form has several meanings (polysemy or homonymy), the hearer settles on the most accessible reading that yields adequate effects. "I went to the bank" is read as riverbank in a fishing conversation and financial institution in a money conversation, because context makes one sense more accessible and more relevant.
"She told her she'd failed" is hopelessly underspecified out of context; the hearer assigns referents to the pronouns by choosing the assignment that makes the utterance optimally relevant given what is mutually known.
Utterances are routinely linguistically underdetermined — the words alone do not fix the full proposition meant. The hearer enriches the encoded meaning into a complete explicature. "I've had breakfast", decoded literally, says only that the speaker has had breakfast at some past time; in answer to "Do you want something to eat?", it is enriched to "I've had breakfast this morning and am not hungry now". (The term explicature — the pragmatically developed explicit content — contrasts with implicature, the wholly inferred content, and using the pair accurately is a strong AO1 move.)
Relevance Theory accommodates the fact that we constantly speak loosely. "The lecture hall was empty" is read as empty of people, not literally devoid of chairs and a podium. "I'm starving" is read as very hungry. Such loose and hyperbolic uses are not deviations to be specially licensed; they simply achieve optimal relevance — a vivid effect for minimal effort — and the hearer broadens or narrows the encoded concept (an ad hoc concept) to whatever yields the most relevant reading.
This last idea — ad hoc concept construction — deserves a little more attention, because it is one of relevance theory's most powerful and distinctive tools and a precise piece of terminology to deploy. The claim is that hearers do not simply retrieve the fixed, dictionary meaning of a word; they adjust it on the fly to the meaning that yields optimal relevance in context, constructing an "ad hoc" (occasion-specific) concept that may be narrower or broader than the lexically encoded one.
When a parent says a sulking teenager is "a saint", the word is broadened into an ironic ad hoc concept; when a host says the soup is "warm" to imply it has gone tepid, the concept is narrowed; when "flat" is applied to a disappointing party, the spatial concept is loosened into an ad hoc concept of dullness. On this view, literal use, approximation, hyperbole and metaphor form a single continuum of concept-adjustment, all driven by the same search for relevance, rather than four separate phenomena needing four separate accounts. The analytical value is considerable: it lets you explain precisely how a single ordinary word is recalibrated in context to carry an evaluative or figurative charge, and saying that a writer "invites the construction of a narrowed ad hoc concept" is a far sharper observation than noting vaguely that a word is "used figuratively".
A genuine strength of the theory is that it does not treat figures of speech as a special department needing their own rules. Metaphor, hyperbole and irony fall out of the same relevance-driven comprehension procedure that governs literal talk — they sit on a continuum of more or less loose use.
"My surgeon is a butcher." The hearer does not (absurdly) conclude the surgeon works in a meat trade. Following least effort, they derive a set of weak implicatures — clumsy, imprecise, brutal with the blade, indifferent to the patient. The metaphor is relevant because it conveys a rich array of implications cheaply; on this view metaphor is just a relatively radical case of concept-broadening, not a rule-breaking anomaly.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.