![]() (This is the communicative principle of relevance.) It further claims that this mandates the relevance-theoretic comprehension heuristic: a fast and frugal procedure dedicated to processing utterances. Relevance theory claims that this raises a defeasible expectation that the utterance will be “optimally relevant” that is, that it is both relevant enough to be worth processing and as relevant as the speaker is willing and able to make it. Speakers want to be understood, and they therefore tailor their utterances to their audience. Although on this view we have a tendency to seek the greatest possible payoff for the least possible effort, there is no general guarantee that an input to a cognitive process will be relevant. The former is the cognitive principle of relevance: cognition tends to seek maximal relevance, where an input to a cognitive process is more relevant the more positive effects it has on the mind’s representations of the world, and less relevant the greater the effort required to derive them. It makes foundational claims about both cognition in general and utterances and how they are processed in particular. ![]() Relevance theory attempts to provide a psychologically realistic, explicit account of communication. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |