Relevance Theory: A Brief Introduction

RT is basically a theory of communication that describes how the process of

communication is accomplished. Pioneered by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (1985 and
1995) RT was built on some of the insights of Paul Grice who challenged the standard model
of communication that was prevalent till them. In the field of Pragmatics, one of the
fundamental premisesgoing all the way back to Aristotlewas that communication is
fundamentally a process of code manipulation.1 The speaker in the process of encoding pairs
her message to a set of symbols (words) which are then transmitted to the receiver. In order to
understand the message, the receiver recovers it by a process of decoding.2 This has been a
very influential model partly because of its simplicity and partly because there is an element
of coding/decoding in all communication. The problem, nonetheless, with the code model of
communication is that in a majority of cases involving human communication the linguistic
meaningor the semantic representation, as Sperber and Wilson prefer to call itis often
not sufficient to determine what the speaker meant.3 But at the same time, in most cases, the
receiver somehow manages to make sense of the communication. (For the sake of clarity we
will adopt the terminology used by Sperber and Wilson: the sentence is only the linguistic
element of the message whereas the utterance is the linguistic element plus non-linguistic
elements).4 Thus, it would appear that linguistic meaning is enhanced further by the receiver
in some manner which enables him to access the message. Or in other words, linguistic
meaning underdetermines what is said.5
1 Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (2nd edn.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 5-6.
2 Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber, Outline of Relevance Theory, Notes on Linguistics 39
(1987): 36.
3 Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, 8-9.
4 Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, 9.
5 Robyn Carston, Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 19. Also see Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, 10-15 for a detailed
listing of the various ways in which linguistic representation is inadequate to communicate
the complete sense of an utterance.
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The question then is how is the receiver able to supply what was lacking in the
sentence and thereby arrive at the meaning of the utterance, since the coding/decoding
process works only at the level of the sentence (the linguistic elements) and so fails to
account for the non-linguistic elements in the message? Grices contribution to the subject
was by proposing the inferential model as an alternative to the code model of
communication.6 In this model, the interpretive mode moves away from a coding/decoding
process to an inferential process. In an inferential process the hearer is engaged in a
continuous (and often iterative) process of formulating and evaluating hypothesis so as to
infer what the sender intends to communicate.7 The communication process is initiated by the
sender by expressing her intention to communicate. This intention to communicate activates
the inferential process in the hearer who proceeds to infer the meaning of the communication
from the linguistic and non-linguistic (or contextual) information available.8 According to
Grice, the reason an audience goes through such a process of inference is because all humans
implicitly hold on to a series of assumption regarding the speaker and her intentions, which
he calls the maxims of conversational cooperation.9 Grice argues that there are nine such
maxims that every speaker is expected to uphold. These maxims can be categorized into four
general expectations from communicators, namely that their statements are truthful,
informative, relevant, and without ambiguity.10
Sperber and Wilson accept the inferential framework proposed by Grice, but modify his
maxims of conversational cooperation. Instead of the assumption of the speaker and hearer
cooperating to communicate and understand respectively, Sperber and Wilson propose the
idea of relevance.11 Relevance could loosely be defined as the profit, benefit, or return that a
6 Carston, Thoughts, 205-206.
7 Wilson and Sperber, Outline, 40.
8 Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber, Relevance Theory, in Handbook of Pragmatics (eds.
Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward; Oxford; Blackwell, 2004), 607.
9 John I. Saeed, Semantics (3rd edn. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 213-218.
10 Saeed, Semantics, 213-214. Also see Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, 33-34.
11 Saeed, Semantics, 218.
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hearer gets out of a communication.12 Sperber and Wilson argue that humans are constantly
bombarded with stimuli that compete with each other in demanding attention. Since it is not
realistically possible to consider each of them individually humans have adapted to focus
only on those inputs that promise sufficient benefits or returns.13 The understanding that
human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance is one of the two
central commitments of RT and is known as the Cognitive Principle of Relevance.14 However,
the process of selecting the most relevant stimulus from a set of competing stimuli in order to
maximize relevance is not without any cost, since the human mind needs to expend effort (in
terms of memory, perception, inference, etc.) to process the stimuli.15 Hence, the process of
maximization of relevance cannot go on indefinitely till the absolute maximum is achieved.
Consequently, while the human mind would ideally like to maximize relevance, in reality, as
the processing effort increases the relevance decreases. Since the assessed relevance is offset
by the processing effort the human cognitive systems appears to make a trade-off between the
two competing desires. In other words, the various subsystems [of the human cognitive
system] involved, in effect, conspire together in a bid to achieve the greatest number of
cognitive effects for the least processing effort overall.16
Now Relevance Theory follows Grice in accepting the premise that intentions are central to
human communication.
This is because Sperber and Wilson distinguish between informative intent and
communicative intent. Informative intent is the intention of the communicator to make
manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumptions.17 The communicative intent
seeks to make it mutually manifest to audience and communicator that the communicator

12 Saeed, Semantics, 218.

13 Wilson and Sperber, Relevance, 610.
14 Wilson and Sperber, Relevance, 610.
15 Wilson and Sperber, Relevance, 609.
16 Carston, Thoughts, 45.
17 Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, 58.
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has this informative intention.18 Sperber and Wilson define Ostensive-Inferential

Communication as an act of communication in which the communicator informs the audience
of his intention to communicate.19 So while communication using actions or gestures may
have an informative intention, they lack the communicative intention. Within the framework
of RT is imperative that communicator should make the communicative intention explicit

18 Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, 61.

19 Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, 60-63, and Wilson and Sperber, Relevance, 611.
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