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Let us look a little more closely at example (15) above, in which Mary says "Coffee would keep me awake", intending Peter to supply the assumption that she doesn't want to stay awake and derive the conclusion that she doesn't want any coffee. Would Mary's utterance, on this interpretation, be consistent with the principle of relevance? If this were all she wanted to communicate, the answer would be 'No'.
To see why this is so, we need to ask ourselves two questions, corresponding to the two clauses of the definition of optimal relevance: (a) could Mary have expected her utterance, on this interpretation, to achieve adequate effects? and (b) was there some other utterance (equally easy for Mary to produce) which would have achieved the intended effects more economically? It seems clear that the answer to question (a) is 'Yes'. After all, by asking the question in (17a), Peter has indicated that a 'yes' or a 'no' answer would be adequately relevant to him. It seems equally clear, though, that if all Mary wanted to communicate was that she didn't want any coffee, she could have communicated it more economically by saying, simply, 'No'. Her utterance, on this interpretation, fails clause (b) of the definition of optimal relevance: it puts the hearer to some gratuitous effort.
It follows that if Mary was aiming at optimal relevance, she must have intended the indirect answer in (17b) to achieve some additional contextual effects, not achievable by the direct answer 'No'. Once alerted, we can see that this is so. By saying that coffee would keep her awake, Mary not only refuses the coffee but gives an explanation for her refusal - an explanation which would not have been communicated by the simple answer 'No'.
This example illustrates a very pervasive feature of utterance interpretation. Any element of indirectness in an utterance demands additional processing effort, and thus, by clause (b) of the definition of optimal relevance, encourages a search for additional effects, effects that a more direct formulation would not have achieved.
Returning to the McEnroe example, we can see that a similar sort of indirectness argument applies. I have suggested that the hearer of (7) is intended to supply the assumption in (20) and derive the conclusion in (21):
(7) He has much in common with John McEnroe.
(20) John McEnroe behaves badly on court.
(21) The new doubles partner behaves badly on court.
But if the only information the speaker wanted to communicate was that her new doubles partner behaved badly on court, why not say so directly? Why put her hearer to the additional effort of processing (7), looking into his encyclopaedic entry for John McEnroe, retrieving assumption (20) and then performing a step of logical inference to arrive at (21)? It follows from clause (b) of the definition of optimal relevance that by putting her hearer to this additional effort, she must have intended to achieve some additional effect not achievable by saying simply (21). Here, the most likely line of interpretation is that she has in mind a particular degree and type of bad-temperedness: in other words, that she is encouraging her hearer to draw the conclusion in (22):
(22) The new doubles partner is bad-tempered on court in a similar way to John McEnroe.
And that, of course, is something that would not have been achieved by saying simply (21).
Metaphor provides a further type of indirectness argument. Consider (23) and (24):
(23) John is a lion.
(24) Bill is a donkey.
Many analysts of metaphor argue that these utterances communicate (25) and (26), respectively:
(25) John is brave.
(26) Bill is stupid.
Certainly, given stereotypical assumptions about lions and donkeys, these conclusions could be derived as contextual implications from (23) and (24). Within the framework of relevance theory, however, there is an indirectness argument to show that these analyses are inadequate as they stand. If all the speaker of (23) wanted to communicate was that John was brave, why not say so directly? Why put the hearer to the additional effort of processing (25), accessing the contextual assumption that lions are brave, and deriving (25) as a contextual implication? A speaker aiming at optimal relevance must have intended to achieve some additional effects not achievable simply by saying (25): she might have intended to communicate, for example, not only that John is brave, but that he is brave in the way a lion is: the courage is physical rather than mental, depends on physical rather than moral strength, and so on. that is, she might have intended to communicate something more like (27):
(27) John is brave in the way a lion is brave.
And (23) might well have been a more economical way of achieving these effects than saying (27) directly. Parallel arguments apply to (24) and (26).
Indirectness involves making the hearer derive as a contextual implication something that could have been said directly. Not all arguments based on effort involve indirectness. Compare (28) and (29), for example:
(28) That was a stupid thing to do.
(29) That was a stupid, stupid thing to do.
It has often been noted that repetition can have an intensifying effect. Thus (29) might be understood as communicating something like (30):
(30) That was a very stupid thing to do.
Relevance theory suggests a natural explanation. By repeating 'stupid', the speaker puts the hearer to some additional effort. By clause (b) of the definition of optimal relevance, she must therefore have intended to achieve some additional effects, not achievable by use of the simpler (28). The most natural assumption – and hence the one favoured by considerations of optimal relevance – is that she thought the action described was stupider than would have been indicated by the use of (28). On this interpretation, (29) would indeed have been equivalent to (30).[2]
7. Relevance theory and Gricean pragmatics
Grice's William James Lectures, delivered in 1967, offered the first systematic alternative to a code theory of communication and understanding. Focusing on the implicit aspects of communication, Grice argued that the implicatures of an utterance are not decoded but inferred, by a non-demonstrative inference process in which contextual assumptions and general principles of communication play an important role. His account of implicatures as beliefs that have to be attributed to the speaker in order to preserve the assumption that she has obeyed a Co-operative Principle and maxims of truthfulness, informativeness, relevance and clarity, had instant appeal, provoked a flood of research, and is the starting point for most pragmatic theories today.
Grice's insights left many questions unanswered. There were questions, in particular, about the nature and source of the Co-operative Principle and maxims. Is co-operation essential to communication? Do speakers really aim at truthfulness, informativeness, relevance and clarity? What is relevance? Grice left this undefined. Where do the Co-operative Principle and maxims come from? Are they universal? If so, are they innate? Are they culture-specific? If so, why do they vary, and how are they acquired? In our book Relevance, Dan Sperber and I set out to answer these questions. The resulting theory, sketched above, looks rather different from Grice's.
There is a difference, first, over the role of the Co-operative Principle and maxims. For Grice, the fundamental principle of communication is the Co-operative Principle, according to which the speaker should try to make her contribution "such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange". Grice assumed that every utterance, every conversation, has an accepted purpose or direction whose identification plays a crucial role in comprehension. This raises two questions: how is the accepted purpose of the utterance identified? and, once identified, how does it help with comprehension? Neither question has received a satisfactory answer.
Consider example (1) above ("If you're looking for a good job, we're offering a thousand a week"). The purpose of this advertisement is to attract people to the employment agency in question. As far as I can see, this purpose could be equally well achieved on either of the interpretations mentioned: how, then, does knowing the purpose of the advertisement help to choose between them? Consider the McEnroe example. The purpose of this utterance is to inform the hearer about the speaker's new doubles partner. It could equally well achieve this purpose on either the minimal, correct interpretation, or any of the more expansive interpretations which we have seen are incorrect. How, then, does knowing the purpose of the utterance help with the identification of the intended context and implicatures? These questions have not been satisfactorily answered within the Gricean framework.
There is a more serious problem with the Co-operative Principle. To the extent that the purpose of an utterance does play a role in comprehension, this merely adds a further question to the list of questions that the hearer has to answer: how is the accepted purpose of an utterance identified? Grice gives no answer to this. Like many theorists of communication, he seems to have assumed that the purpose of an utterance, like the set of intended contextual assumptions, is somehow given in advance of the comprehension process, or identifiable independently of it. In fact, it could not be identified by use of the Co-operative Principle itself, on pain of circularity: to identify the purpose of an utterance by use of the Co-operative Principle, one would already have to know it. Grice's theory of communication thus rests on the assumption that the purpose of an utterance is identifiable by some process that falls outside the scope of comprehension proper, and that is never satisfactorily explained.
Relevance theory suggests the following explanation. There is no Co-operative Principle, and hence no circularity in assuming that the purpose of an utterance can be identified, where necessary, as part of the comprehension process. To the extent that the purpose of an utterance does contribute to comprehension, it is identifiable as a contextual assumption like any other, via the criterion of consistency with the principle of relevance. In this framework, there is room for a notion of purpose, but the real burden of explanation lies elsewhere.
Among the maxims, Grice sees truthfulness as the most important; relevance theory argues that there is no maxim of truthfulness, and indeed no maxims at all.[3] Relevance theory is not a rule-based or maxim-based system. In this framework, relevance is fundamental to communication not because speakers obey a maxim of relevance, but because relevance is fundamental to cognition. As a result, the questions that arise in Grice's framework about the number of the maxims, their universality or culture-dependence, their acquisition, and the relative weight attached to each of them, do not arise.
A further difference between the two frameworks is over the role of maxim-violation. Grice listed a number of ways in which a speaker could violate the maxims: she could opt out, explicitly or implicitly, thus suspending a maxim; she could covertly violate a maxim, with intent to deceive; or she could overtly violate a maxim, thus creating an implicature. Although the mechanisms involved were unclear, the assumption that overt violation can create an implicature plays a crucial role in Grice's framework, and in particular in his account of metaphor and irony. This assumption has rarely been questioned (though see Hugly and Sayward 1979 for excellent discussion). Relevance theory rejects it.
The principle of relevance is not a maxim: it is not a rule that speakers can obey or disobey: it is an exceptionless generalisation about what happens when someone is addressed. In such a framework, it makes no sense to claim that the principle of relevance can be overtly violated to create an implicature. How, then, do metaphor, irony, and the other phenomena that Grice analysed in terms of maxim violation, arise?
Sperber and Wilson argue that metaphor is simply a variety of loose talk. In a framework with no maxim of truthfulness, where speakers are not constrained to say only what is strictly speaking true, speaking loosely is often the best way of achieving optimal relevance. Hence, metaphor should arise naturally in such a framework. As we saw in section 6 above, the interpretation of metaphor involves an element of indirectness. This calls for extra processing effort, which, according to clause (b) of the definition of optimal relevance, must be offset by extra effects. In this framework, indirectness, with its resulting increase in processing effort demanded and contextual effects achieved, does much of the work that maxim-violation was supposed to do for Grice.[4]
A further difference between the Gricean approach and relevance theory is that whereas Grice was mainly concerned with the implicit side of communication, relevance theory has been equally concerned with the explicit side. Relevance theorists have looked in particular at the role of contextual factors in disambiguation, reference assignment and other processes that contribute, in Grice's terms, to what was said rather than what was implicated: that is, to the truth-conditional content of utterances. Much work has been done on distinguishing explicit from implicit communication, and truth-conditional from non-truth-conditional meaning; this seems to me to have been a particularly fruitful line of research.[5]
Having drawn attention to some of the differences between Gricean pragmatics and relevance theory, I would like to end by underlining what they have in common. Relevance theory rests squarely on Gricean foundations: Sperber & Wilson accept Grice's view that the goal of pragmatic theory is to explain how the hearer recognises the overtly intended interpretation of an utterance; they acknowledge the importance of non-demonstrative inference in comprehension, and agree with Grice that general principles of communication play a major role in the inference process, though not, perhaps, in quite the way Grice thought.
References
Blakemore, D. 1987 Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Blackwell, Oxford.
Blakemore, D. 1992 Understanding Utterances. Blackwell, Oxford.
Blass, R. 1990 Relevance relations in discourse. CUP, Cambridge.
Carston, R. 1988 'Explicature, implicature and truth-theoretic semantics'. In Kempson 1988: 155-81. Reprinted in Davis 1991: 33-51.
Davis, S. (ed.) 1991 Pragmatics: A Reader. OUP, Oxford.
Grice, H.P. 1967 William James Lectures. Reprinted in Grice, H.P. 1989 Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard UP, Cambridge, MA.
Gutt, E.-A. 1991 Translation and relevance: Cognition and Communication. Blackwell, Oxford.
Hugly, P. & Sayward, C. 1979 A problem about conversational implicatures. Linguistics and Philosophy 3: 19-25.
Katz, J. 1972 Semantic Theory. New York, Harper & Row.
Kempson, R. (ed.) 1988 Mental Representation: The Interface between Language and Reality. CUP, Cambridge.
Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson 1985/6 'Loose talk'. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society NS LXXXVI: 153-71. Reprinted in Davis 1991: 540-49.
Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre 1986 Relevance: Communication and cognition. Blackwell, Oxford; Harvard UP, Cambridge MA.
Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre 1987 'Presumptions of relevance, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10.4: 736-54.
Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre 1990 'Rhetoric and relevance'. In D. Wellbery & J. Bender (eds) The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice. Stanford UP, Stanford CA: 140-55.
Wilson, Deirdre & Sperber, Dan 1988 'Representation and relevance'. In Kempson 1988: 133-53.
Wilson, Deirdre & Sperber, Dan 1992 'On verbal irony'. Lingua 87: 53-76.
Wilson, Deirdre & Sperber, Dan forthcoming. 'Linguistic form and relevance'. To appear in Lingua.
[1]. An excellent textbook on relevance theory is Blakemore 1992. For further discussion, see the multiple review of Relevance in Brain and Behavioral Sciences 10.4 1987, and the reply in Sperber & Wilson 1987. For applications of relevance theory, see Blakemore 1987, Blass 1990 and Gutt 1991.
[2]. For further discussion of the effects of repetition, see Relevance chapter 4, section 6, pp 219-22.
[3]. For discussion of the maxim of truthfulness, see Sperber & Wilson 1986a, Wilson & Sperber 1988.
[4]. For discussion of metaphor and irony within the relevance-theoretic framework, see Sperber & Wilson 1985/6, 1990; Wilson & Sperber 1988, 1992.
[5]. See, for example, Blakemore 1987, 1992; Carston 1988; Wilson & Sperber forthcoming. Several papers on relevance theory are collected in Davis 1991; see also two recent issues of Lingua devoted to recent work on relevance theory.
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