تسجيل الدخول

تسجيل

Relevance Theory

المؤلف:  Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green

المصدر:  Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction

الجزء والصفحة:  C13-P459

2026-01-31

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Relevance Theory

Relevance Theory was developed by psychologist Dan Sperber and linguist Deirdre Wilson, and develops key insights from the well-known theory of pragmatics proposed by Paul Grice (1975). We base our discussion here on the 1995 edition of their landmark book, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, which was originally published in 1986. Relevance Theory represents a modern approach to pragmatics that adopts an explicitly generative view of language, and aims to provide a mentalist account of communication that can be integrated with the generative model of language. Despite its generative orientation, in its emphasis on linguistic communication within the context of general cognition, Relevance Theory is consonant with cognitive semantics in a number of respects. For example, Sperber and Wilson reject the semantic decomposition account of word meaning that characterises the standard formal view, and argue in favour of the incorporation of encyclopaedic meaning within the lexical representation of words. In this section, we focus on the Relevance Theoretic account of meaning construction, or sentence meaning.