Introduction

Sperber and Wilson (1986a) point out that, as a general tendency or in given situations, humans pay attention to some phenomena rather than others; they represent these phenomena to themselves in one way rather than another; they process these representations in one context rather than another. What determines which phenomena they attend to, and what representations and contexts they construct? Sperber and Wilson suggest that there is a single general answer to these questions. Humans tend to pay attention to what is relevant to them; they form the most relevant possible representations of these phenomena, and process them in a context that maximises their relevance. They claim that relevance, and the maximisation of relevance, is the key to human cognition. This has consequences for the communicator: by demanding attention from the audience she suggests that the information she is offering is relevant enough to be worth the audience's attention. Thus relevance is the key to communication too. In this chapter, I hope to explain and justify these claims.

By showing why speakers might be expected to aim at a certain standard of relevance if they want to keep their audience's attention, Sperber and Wilson remedy one of the main inadequacies of Grice's pragmatic approach: Grice provides little justification or explanation of his own pragmatic maxims. I will show later on in this chapter that their criterion for utterance interpretation is strict enough to eliminate all but a single interpretation, thus remedying another of the main weaknesses of Grice's approach.

In a later section, I will show how relevance theory provides a better theoretical foundation for comprehension and textuality than coherence models.