Relevance theory

Relevance theory

There are two ways to conceive of how thoughts can be communicated from one person to another. The first way is through the use of strict coding and decoding, which makes explicit use of symbols, rules, and language. The second way is by making interpretive inferences, which communicate to the hearer information that is left implicit.

Relevance theory is a proposal (by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson) that seeks to explain the second method of communication: implicit inferences. It argues that the human mind will instinctively react to an encoded message by considering information that it conceives to be relevant to the message. By "relevance" it is meant whatever allows the "most new information" to be transmitted in that context on the basis of the "least amount of effort" required to convey it.

Overview

Sperber and Wilson’s theory begins with some watershed assumptions that are typical of Pragmatic theories. Namely, it agrees that all utterances are encountered in some context, frequently make use of sentences, and that all utterances convey a number of implicatures. 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 “principle of relevance”, one of the four Gricean maxims, which states that any utterance addressed to someone automatically conveys the presumption of its own optimal relevance. In this way, the vast majority of acts of communication will implicitly make manifest the intent to communicate. However, the actual process of deciphering other implicit interpretations is largely left to the communicators themselves by using mental shorthands, or heuristics.

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 speech.

Terminology

* Sentence
* Sentence Utterance
* Sentence Sense
** Logical Form
* Explicature
** Contextually-Enriched Logical Form
** Fully-Propositional Logical Form
** Truth-Conditional Proposition
** Explicit Proposition
** Explicated Proposition
* Implicature
** Implicit Proposition
** Implicated Proposition

; Encoding: A sentence "encodes" a set of sentence senses.; Deriving/Entailment: A set of sentence senses "entail" a contextually-enriched logical form.; Deriving/Implying: An explicit proposition "implies" implicit propositions.

See also

* Gricean maxims

References

*Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. (1987) Precis of Relevance: Communication and Cognition. "Behavioral and Brain Sciences." 10, 697-754.
*Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. (1995). "Relevance: Communication and cognition" (2nd ed.) Oxford: Blackwell.
*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.com/relevance_theory.htm]


Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Поможем написать курсовую

Look at other dictionaries:

  • Relevance (disambiguation) — Relevance is a measure of how pertinent, connected, or applicable something is.Relevance may also refer to:*Relevance (information retrieval), a measure of a document s applicability to a given subject or search query *Relevance (law), regarding… …   Wikipedia

  • Relevance — is a term used to describe how pertinent, connected, or applicable something is to a given matter. A thing is relevant if it serves as a mean to a given purpose. Imagine a patient suffering a well defined disease such as scurvy caused by lack of… …   Wikipedia

  • Relevance Vector Machine — (RVMs) is a machine learning technique that uses Bayesian theory to obtain sparse solutions for regression and classification. The RVM has an identical functional form to the Support Vector Machine, but provides probabilistic… …   Wikipedia

  • Theory (mathematical logic) — This article is about theories in a formal language, as studied in mathematical logic. For other uses, see Theory (disambiguation). In mathematical logic, a theory (also called a formal theory) is a set of sentences in a formal language. Usually… …   Wikipedia

  • Theory of everything — A theory of everything (TOE) is a putative theory of theoretical physics that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena. Initially, the term was used with an ironic connotation to refer to various overgeneralized theories.… …   Wikipedia

  • relevance — noun ADJECTIVE ▪ considerable, great, wider ▪ limited, marginal ▪ This debate has limited relevance to our current concerns. ▪ dubious …   Collocations dictionary

  • Relevance paradox — The relevance paradox occurs where individual professionals or a group of professionals are unaware of certain essential information which would guide them to make better decisions, and help them avoid inevitable, unintended and undesirable… …   Wikipedia

  • Theory — The word theory has many distinct meanings in different fields of knowledge, depending on their methodologies and the context of discussion.In science a theory is a testable model of the manner of interaction of a set of natural phenomena,… …   Wikipedia

  • Theory of Portuguese discovery of Australia — Although most historians hold that the European discovery of Australia began in 1606 with the voyage of the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon on board the Duyfken , a number of alternative theories have been put forward. Precedence of discovery has …   Wikipedia

  • Theory X and Theory Y — Two conflicting theories regarding the human motivation to work, put forward by the US psychologist Douglas McGregor (1906 64), which have relevance in human resource managementTheory X is based on the premise that people are inherently lazy,… …   Big dictionary of business and management

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”