Theory of Relevance

Abstract

The theory of relevance has emerged as a cognitive approach to pragmatics, and this is based on two basic principles. Human Cognition and Communicative Principle. Human cognition tends to the optimization of relevance while the core concept of cognition is geared towards an understanding of messages by explicating contents in them with the objective of providing the most suitable utterness. The communicative principle refers to human utterances creating intentions of optimum relevance. Any act of ostensive communication (Behavioral characteristic that communicates the intention to communicate) communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance. This theory of relevance has added up several crucial theoretical concepts such as explicate, echoic uses of language, the strength of communicated assumptions and distinctions such as decoding versus inference, explicate versus implicature, conceptual versus procedural meaning, interpretive versus descriptive uses of language, saying versus implicating) and so forth which is within the definition of natural language.  This is a good move from conventional studies of Gricean and neo-Gricean theories of pragmatics confined to the cognitive framework.