ABSTRACT

Relevance theory may have indeed been motivated by Grice's seminal work, but it also departs quite substantially from it in important respects. It was not until the development of relevance theory in the 1980s that the term 'relevance', in the technical sense Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson assigned to it, gained its place as a fundamental concept in the study of inferential pragmatics. The chapter identifies the cognitive mechanism that is, according to relevance theorists, responsible for the pragmatic processing that mediates the comprehension of communicative stimuli and described relevance as a balance between effort and cognitive gain. In this way, relevance theory shifts the focus from the theoretical convenience that ties many researchers of pragmatics to a particular philosophical outlook in relation to the study of communication and opens up the way for the fruitful interaction of philosophical and psychological research.