ABSTRACT
Keywords: context, explicature, higher level explicature, implicature, indeterminacy, inference, procedural and conceptual encoding, propositional attitude, propositional form, relevance, salience
6.1 Introduction In the previous chapter, we examined Grice’s argument that contributions to talk are guided by the four maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner. We then examined the ways in which utterance-type meanings are inferred in the work of the neo-Griceans. In this chapter, we examine the argument set out in Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s major book, Relevance: Communication and Cognition ([1986] 1995), that a single principle of relevance is sufficient to explain the process of utterance understanding. While neo-Gricean thinking tends to focus on the relationship of utterance form to informativeness, Sperber and Wilson show how the cognitive notion of relevance rather than probabilistic induction is crucial in utterance understanding.
