Principles, norms and means of communication according to Relevance Theory

Sperber and Wilson’s Theory of Relevance (1986) corresponds to Grice’s conviction (1989:

49), shared with Levinson, that the essential feature of human communication is expressing and recognition of intentions (Wilson and Sperber 2004: 607). This gave rise to Sperber and Wilson’s „inferential model of communication”, according to which the speaker proves his intention to convey particular meanings based on which the hearer tries to recognize the meanings the speaker intended or, in other words, infers the communicator’s intended meaning. Sperber and Wilson claim that “communicators – like human agents in general – form intentions over whose fulfillment they have some control: they may have some controllable effect on their audience’s cognitive environment, much less on their audience’s actual thoughts, and they form the intentions accordingly” (Sperber and Wilson 1995:58).

As Relevance Theory states, the addresser gives a stimulus which enables the addressee to identify the intended meaning by recognizing the speaker’s “informative intention” to convey it. This intention is defined as having an aim “to inform the audience of something” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 29), which requires proving that the speaker has such an intention. “To inform the audience of one’s informative intention” is an additional type of intention - the so-called “communicative intention”. This constituent plays an important part in communication and “is fulfilled once the first-order informative intention is recognized”, as it consists in making it “mutually manifest to audience and communicator that the communicator has this informative intention” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 29, 61). Such communication is referred to by Sperber and Wilson as „ostensive inferential communication” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 63, 155) and requires the presence of the

„ostensive stimulus” – a phenomenon helping to achieve the cognitive effect by attracting the hearer’s attention and focusing it on the speaker’s intention - a deliberate intention to produce some information on the part of the speaker and make particular assumptions “manifest or more manifest" (Sperber, Wilson 1986: 50 – 54, 58, 153-154). The ostensive-inferential communication is altogether described as the following process:

The communicator produces a stimulus which makes it mutually manifest to communicator and audience that the communicator intends, by means of this stimulus,

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to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumptions. (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 63, 155)

According to Sperber and Wilson the presence of the ostensive stimulus makes the receiver consider the information conveyed worth processing due to its recognized relevance.

Such a presumption of Relevance Theory is referred to as the „Communicative Principle of Relevance”. The stimulus is produced according to the so-called “optimal relevance”, communicated in “every act of ostensive communication”, which is referred to as the

“Principle of Relevance” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 158).

As the optimal relevance assumes:

(a) The set of assumptions {I} which the communicator intends to make manifest to the addressee is relevant enough to make it worth the addressee’s while to process the ostensive stimulus.

(b) The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one the communicator could have used to communicate {I}. (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 164)

The speaker should then construct an utterance in such a way to give the hearer the possibility to recognize the intended meaning at “the first optimally relevant” interpretation to occur to him, the one that satisfies his expectations, as more than one interpretation is undesirable (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 158, 164-169). Sperber and Wilson refer to this assumption as the “relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure”.

In their Theory of Relevance Sperber and Wilson also refer to one of Grice’s ideas stating that utterances create some expectations which allow the hearer to recognize the meanings conveyed by the speaker (Wilson and Sperber 2004: 607). The basic principle of Relevance Theory is then the conviction that a stimulus (image, sound, utterance etc.), is crucial to the hearer and due to the fact that seeking relevance is the basic feature of human cognition, the hearer can draw relevant conclusions, allowing to answer a question, gain some knowledge, raise doubts etc. It is only possible when the stimulus can lead to the so-called

“positive cognitive effect“, the one making a difference in the hearer’s perception of the world, leading e.g. to a true conclusion. The more positive effects the hearer gains the bigger relevance of the stimulus.

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It happens due to the presence of an important element of the Theory of Relevance - the so-called “processing effort” in cognition - the amount of engagement in order to recognize the intended meaning. As a rule, “an assumption requiring a smaller processing effort is more relevant” and vice versa (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 125). To reduce the processing effort while seeking relevance is a natural feature of human communication.

According to Sperber and Wilson, the speaker refers to “explicatures” and

“implicatures” while communicating. Sperber and Wilson claim that “The explicit content of an utterance is a set of decoded assumptions, and the implicit content a set of inferred assumptions” – Sperber and Wilson 1995: 182). Explicatures do not raise any doubts as for interpretation. According to Sperber and Wilson “An assumption communicated by an utterance U is explicit if and only if it is a development of a logical form encoded by U”

(Sperber and Wilson 1986: 182). The communication might also be conveyed through “strong implicatures”, allowing the recognition of information as crucial for interpretation and satisfying the hearer’s expectations for relevance. The „weak implicatures” allow to reach relevant interpretation but are not essential, as the utterance suggests more than one possible implicature. The use of a few weak implicatures in an utterance instead of a single strong implicature in order to reach relevance is referred to as the “poetic effect”(Sperber and Wilson 1986: 222-224).

In the light of Relevance Theory it can be assumed that communication is a matter of degree – when informative intention is made strongly manifest through strong implicatures, the assumption is strongly communicated, when the intention is weakly manifest, by way of weak implicatures, the assumption is weakly communicated. That will be a key point in constructing ideologically influenced utterances.

The rules of communication applied according to the Theory of Relevance are useful also in terms of translation – the level of the cognitive effect reached through the processing effort, via interpreting implicatures, explicatures, or ostensive stimuli depends on the translator’s intention and abilities to render the meanings intended by the original communicator. This is the rule that, as can be taken for granted, applies to communication theories in a comparable amount as to translations.

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1.5 Communication from the perspective of cognitivism and cognitive