Янко Слава (Библиотека Fort/Da) || slavaaa@yandex.ru || http://yanko.lib.ru || Icq# 75088656

References

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RELEVANCE THEORY IN TEXT AND DISCOURSE. Jutta Muschard

(Hanover University, Germany)

Relevance theory as a communication theory is "relevant" whenever text, discourse and communication are at issue, e.g. in language teaching, language acquisition, translation as interlinguistic communication, intercultural linguistic studies, humour theories, etc. Two of these areas have been investigated by the author and will, after a brief introduction to relevance theory, be discussed.

1. What is relevance theory?

Relevance theory [11] is a cognitive, pragmatic theory based on the underlying model of inferential communication. Human attention and thought "automatically turn toward information which seems relevant: To communicate is to claim someone's attention, hence to communicate is to imply that the information communicated is relevant" [12. P. 697].

Relevance theory is set off against the traditional code model. The latter often is represented as a chain beginning with the speaker's thought which is linguistically encoded and articulated as an acoustic signal which is received as such by the hearer and, after having been linguistically decoded, enters the hearer's mind as received thought (cf. for instance [11. P. 5]. By contrast, relevance theory claims that "communication is achieved not by coding and decoding messages, but by providing evidence for an intended hypothesis about the communicator's intentions" [12. P. 8], which - and here is the fundamental difference between the inferential models and the code models - implies the risk of being misinterpreted whereas decoding procedures guarantee one interpretation only, namely the correct one.

D. Sperber and D.Wilson refer to P. Grice as a forerunner of the inferential theory of communication. P. Grice developed his maxims of conversation, namely that of quality, quantity, relation, and manner, and subordinated them to the Cooperative Principle (СР). The maxims and the СР together explain why communication functions rather smoothly in spite of the fact that communication consists not only of the outspoken, the explicit information but also, and often to a considerable degree, of implicit information. The fact that speakers as well as hearers practically automatically observe the СР as well as the maxims serves as an explanation why implicitly communicated information is interpreted correctly to a rather high degree [6. P. 41-58].

The Gricean approach, however, does not answer all the questions D. Sperber and D. Wilson ask with regard to pragmatic data and the nature of communication. Hence, D. Sperber and D. Wilson begin to develop their own model of relevance in connection with human cognition where P. Grice left off, a model based on conventional and conversational implicature or implication (both terms are used synonymously by D. Sperber and D. Wilson and both mean the process and the result of implying or being implied without being plainly expressed, i.e. implicitly).

Conventional (lexical/semantic) implicatures represent a stable meaning as we find it in presuppositions (e.g. the cat killed the bird —> the bird is dead). The death of the bird is inferred on

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the basis of the lexical or semantic meaning of kill. In conversational implicatures, meaning depends on the situation, i.e. the interpretation of communication is based on the situation of the utterance. Both processes, conventional implicature and conversational implicature, are based on inference.

The term "inference" goes back to Logic: the forming of a conclusion from data or premises; reasoning from something known or assumed to something else which follows from it. One of the rules of inference is the modus ponens: p. If p, then q. Hence, q is illustrated as follows:

p = Philip lives in London.

if p —> q = If Philip lives in London, Philip lives in England. q = Philip lives in England.

While a sentence like If the cat killed the bird, the bird is dead can be interpreted on the basis of semantics, the inferential interpretation of If Philip lives in London, Philip lives in England depends on our knowledge of the world, here on geographical knowledge. Other utterances such as The police is coming can only be interpreted if the situation is known; the utterance can mean Help is coming, but it can also mean We have to hide; this depends on the situation of the utterance. In other words: implications can be analytic, obtained by a process of deduction, referred to as conventional implicature. They can also be implications which do not follow from the propositional form alone nor from the context alone but from the inferential combination of the two; hence, they are contextual effects in the terminology of relevance theory (see below).

The Gricean maxims and the Cooperative Principle explain why we understand indirect speech acts, conversational implicatures, and irony, in other words thoughts that are not directly expressed. The Cooperative Principle (СР) states that speakers and hearers try to cooperate with each other when communicating and that they will, in particular, attempt to be

-informative (maxim of quantity): say neither more nor less than the discourse requires,

-truthful (maxim of quality): do not lie, do not make unsupported claims,

-relevant (maxim of relevance/relation): be relevant; stick to the point,

-clear (maxim of manner): be brief and orderly; avoid ambiguity and obscurity. Maxims can be flouted without detracting from relevance if the cooperative principle is not

violated. If, for instance, it is raining cats and dogs and someone says What a lovely weather today, this is a violation of the maxim of quality (be true) but it is nevertheless relevant if it can be interpreted as an instance of irony. Precondition for irony is, of course, that speaker and hearer know that speaker deliberately says the opposite of what is true (otherwise the statement would be alie!).

D. Sperber and D. Wilson do not only explain why we understand implicit information, but also why we attempt at all to understand all sorts of information, whether they are given implicitly and explicitly. "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 is it that determines these choices? Our suggestion is that humans tend to pay attention to the most relevant phenomena available, that they tend to construct the most relevant possible representation of these phenomena, and to process them in a context that maximises their relevance. Relevance, and the maximisation of relevance, is the key to human cognition" [12. P. 10].

In other words, if a speaker addresses himself/herself to a hearer the latter can assume that the information the speaker intends to convey is worth the hearer's attention and has a meaning that has to do with the hearer's existing assumptions about the world, i.e. is relevant information. This claim, namely the guarantee of relevance, is the pivot of relevance theory which can be described, in a very first and rough attempt, as the interplay between contextual effects gained and processing efforts spent resulting into (optimal) relevance. As these terms are central for relevance theory, they will be explained in some more detail.

1.1. Contextual effects

Relevance is dependent on the persons involved, on the context, and on the situation in general, so that in the framework of relevance theory one and the same utterance can be relevant in one instance and irrelevant in another one (whereas the code model of communication assigns one and only one message to one utterance). Moreover, relevance is gradable: "New information is

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relevant in any context in which it strengthens an existing assumption; and the more assumptions it strengthens, and the more it strengthens them, the more relevant it will be" [12. P. 11].

Another way of achieving relevance, in addition to the strengthening of existing assumptions, is to contradict or to eliminate them. Thus there are three ways for new information to be relevant:

a)by combining with the context to yield contextual implications,

b)by strengthening existing assumptions and

c)by contradicting and eliminating existing assumptions. These three ways are grouped together as contextual effects (cf. [12. P. 12].

It is claimed "that new information is relevant in any context in which it has contextual effects, and the greater its contextual effects, the more relevant it will be" [12. P. 12]. Far more, "the notion of a contextual effect can be used to state a necessary and sufficient condition for relevance: An assumption is relevant in a context, if, and only if, it has some contextual effect in that context" [12. P. 702].

1.2. Processing effort

As to the degree of relevance, the processing effort, i.e. the process necessary to understand the utterance, plays an important role in so far as it detracts from relevance. The easier an utterance is to understand, the smaller is the processing effort and the greater the relevance. This leads D. Sperber and D. Wilson to formulate their comparative definition of relevance as follows:

a)other things being equal, the greater the contextual effects, the greater the relevance, and

b)other things being equal, the smaller the processing effort, the greater the relevance (cf. [12. P. 13]).

1.3. Optimal relevance

As a speaker does neither want to be misunderstood by the hearer nor to lose the hearer's attention one can assume that an utterance provides two guarantees, namely that of adequacy or, in the terminology of D. Sperber and D. Wilson, of contextual effects, and the guarantee that no injustifiable processing efforts will be required from the hearer. If, by means of an utterance or by an act of inferential communication, an adequate range of contextual effects is achieved for the minimum justifiable processing effort this utterance can be called optimally relevant (cf. [12. P. 13-14]).

D. Sperber and D. Wilson re-define Grice's maxim of relevance as follows: "Every act of inferential communication carries a guarantee of optimal relevance" [12. P. 14]. They do not, however, define the terms "adequate range of contextual effects" and "minimum justifiable processing efforts"; it can be assumed that not only relevance as such is gradable (cf. [12. P. 11] but that this claim also applies to the notion of optimal relevance and its constituent parts, namely cognitive effects and processing effort.

The principle of relevance, however, does not only provide an account of successes, but also of failures of disambiguation. This is demonstrated by means of the following utterance with two possible interpretations:

The football team gathered round their coach

a)"The football team gathered round their games teacher",

b)"The football team gathered round their bus" [12. P. 14].

In a situation like the above a speaker who intends to express interpretation (a), for instance, but foresees that (b) is the interpretation most easily accessible, is expected to reformulate the utterance and to replace coach by teacher in order to eliminate the unwanted interpretation (in this case b). Otherwise the speaker's utterance would put the hearer to some unjustifiable processing efforts and thus be inconsistent with the principle of relevance "because the first interpretation - if any - tested and found consistent with the principle of relevance, is the only interpretation consistent with the principle of relevance" (cf. [12. P. 15]).

1.4. Concepts and entries

Another important notion in relevance theory are concepts with their trichotomy of entries: "We treat concepts as triples of (possibly empty) entries - logical, lexical, and encyclopaedic -filed at a single address" [12. P. 702].

These three types of information, stored in memory at a certain conceptual address, are: a set of deductive rules = the logical entry;

the extension and/or denotation of a concept = the encyclopaedic entry;

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