Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

‘relevance’ is appealed to in one of Grice’s maxims. Now, Grice himself devoted little time to his Maxim of Relation, but over the last twenty years, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson have argued that relevance, when properly characterised, is the key to understanding coherence and utterance interpretation generally, and we shall now introduce this perspective.

Relevance Theory

The least clear of Grice’s maxims is that of Relation: what does it mean

for an utterance to be relevant? Utterances are typically very uninformative out of

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context and can be interpreted in all sorts of different ways. For instance, if someone says (540), do they mean the power cut happened a few minutes ago, yesterday, last year? Was it here in the speaker’s neighbourhood, or the hearer’s neighbourhood, or place of work, or the airport at the other side of the world to which the hearer expects to be flying?

(540)

There’s been a power cut

However, the fact is that we use such simple utterances all the time and they can be very informative given the right context.

A central idea of Relevance Theory is that an utterance is relevant to a hearer when the hearer can gain positive cognitive effects from that utterance, that is some useful information. There are two aspects to this. Firstly, the most relevant interpretation of an utterance must lead to inferences that the hearer would not otherwise have been able to make. Secondly, these inferences must be accessible to the hearer in the sense that it must be possible to draw those inferences in a short space of time with relatively little effort. If the inferential process requires too much effort, then the inferences cannot be drawn.

Relevance Theory maintains that speakers comply with a Communicative

Principle of Relevance, which states that when someone communicates in

some way, that communicative act brings with it a guarantee of its own optimal relevance. A hearer, on the other hand, computes relevance by selecting the most obvious (accessible) interpretation, and this process stops when the hearer

achieves some kind of relevant interpretation (or gives up). For instance, suppose Mary is working at her computer one sunny afternoon and the screen suddenly

goes blank for no apparent reason. John then comes into the room and utters (540).

The Communicative Principle of Relevance leads Mary to assume that John’s

utterance is maximally relevant to her, and she will therefore assume that the power cut has affected her house. She will deploy her knowledge of the world to conclude that such a power cut would affect the operation of the computer and, in fact, would account for the machine’s failure. This would be very relevant

information to her. For instance, it would mean she wouldn’t waste time trying to re-boot the machine. Of course, speakers and hearers can make mistakes.

Suppose John is very anxious about his impending flight to New York and has

just learned that the airport he is to fly to has suffered a power cut, possibly jeopardising his visit. Then his utterance of (540) will have entirely different intended effects, and Mary is highly likely to be misled.

Relevance theoreticians argue that the other three Gricean maxims follow from the Principle of Relevance. Recall that the maxims have their communicative

effects because hearers recognise when they are being flouted. Thus, B’s response in (535c) is obviously irrelevant in the context of A’s question. Yet, B’s utterance is supposed to come with a guarantee of its own optimal relevance. Apparently, the maximally relevant answer to A’s question would be ‘Yes’, and this, in fact, is the only sensible answer to B’s counter-question. Why ask such a question if B is observing the Principle of Relevance? Only in order to suggest to A that the

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answer ‘Yes’ applies to A’s question, and, because it requires additional processing over and above that necessary for dealing with ‘Yes’, to impart further (relevant) information to A. In this case, we might suppose that is in the form of the additional suggestion that the answer is pretty obvious and doesn’t brook contradiction (a way of emphasising B’s confidence in his own response).

Relevance-Theoretic considerations can also easily account for discourses such as (539), which aren’t directly amenable to an analysis solely in terms of the flouting of maxims.

Central to Relevance Theory is the idea that we perform inferences all the time in order to understand utterances, and it is interesting that languages have special grammatical devices that can be seen as facilitating this inferencing. Thus, many languages have a grammatical category (for instance a set of verb forms) which indicates that the speaker didn’t witness the event they are reporting. Such devices are called evidentials. And probably all languages have conversational particles which guide the hearer in interpreting utterances. One such particle in English is after all. What does this particle mean in (541)?

(541)

Natasha can do the Russian interpreting. After all, she’s from Moscow.

A speaker would normally use after all in a sentence such as (541) only if they believed that the hearer already knew the content of the proposition which after all introduces. This is clearly seen in (542):

(542)

We MUST go out somewhere nice tonight, after all it is your birthday

It’s hardly likely that the speaker would use (542) to inform the hearer that it was his or her birthday (or even to remind the hearer of this fact).

But why should anyone tell the hearer something they already obviously know?

In particular, how can such an utterance ever be relevant to the hearer (in any sense, but especially in the technical sense of Relevance Theory)? The answer is that after all serves to tell the hearer that the speaker believes that this (shared) fact provides crucial evidence to back up what the speaker has just claimed. The fact that the proposition which is introduced by after all is presented as unequivocal shared knowledge therefore makes it difficult for the hearer to disagree. As a result, even an apparently wholly redundant utterance can be relevant (exercises 6, 7 and 8).

Taking turns

So far, our discussion in this section has involved only very short

stretches of speech, and in general we’ve been able to make our points using constructed examples. However, there is another aspect to the act of talking which isn’t covered by the perspective we gain from pragmatics. When we listen to a group of people in conversation, we generally find that the talk is organised in a rather efficient fashion. And yet conversation usually involves at least two people who may each want to speak, and who don’t necessarily want to listen. How then

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do people negotiate who is to ‘have the floor’ and when that privilege can be ceded to another participant in the conversation? It turns out that there is a host of more or less subtle linguistic signals that we use for this purpose. In addition, talkers often need to convey their attitude to the conversation without explicitly discussing it. For instance, there may be topics which a talker doesn’t want to discuss in detail, or alternatively there may be topics which the hearer wishes to know more about. Languages have a variety of means to allow talkers to give each other information of this kind. The study of these various devices is conducted under the rubric of Conversation Analysis (CA).

CA originated in the work of social psychologists and sociologists and for a long time was poorly integrated into the kinds of mainstream linguistics we have been discussing in this book. Even studies of pragmatics tended to ignore CA.