Comparison with cognitive semantics
In many respects, the Relevance Theory view of meaning construction is similar to the view taken in cognitive approaches, including Mental Spaces Theory and Blending Theory. Both Relevance Theory and cognitive semantics are concerned with describing the mental processes involved in meaning construction. Like cognitive semantics, Relevance Theory focuses upon developing a psychologically plausible account of communication, and in emphasising inference, encyclopaedic knowledge and contextual knowledge, it relates to the processes that mental spaces and blending theorists refer to as projection, mapping, schema induction and integration. Furthermore, both Relevance Theory and cognitive semantics emphasise the idea that meaning construction is in large measure due to these mental processes rather than a simple matter of composing a sentence’s meaning from its parts. Indeed, Sperber and Wilson explicitly reject what they call the ‘code model’ as a descriptively adequate account of communication. Furthermore, Sperber and Wilson claim that explicature, as well as implicature, require extensive inferencing (in processes such as disambiguation and reference assignment). In this respect, and in relying upon contextual and encyclopaedic information in these processes, Sperber and Wilson’s view is consonant with the claim made by cognitive semanticists that words represent ‘prompts’ for meaning construction, and with the idea that a strict dividing line between semantics and pragmatics cannot be straightforwardly upheld. Finally, Sperber and Wilson argue that metaphor and other types of figurative language are unexceptional in the sense that they exploit the same cognitive processes by maximising relevance. In this respect, although the details of the Relevance Theoretic account of metaphor focus more on communication than on cognition, the integration of figurative and literal language is also consonant with the cognitive account.
Despite these areas of agreement, there are some fundamental differences between the two approaches. Most importantly, Relevance Theory assumes as its background a generative model of language; this model assumes the nativist hypothesis and the modularity hypothesis. In addition, Relevance Theory assumes a logical truth-conditional account of certain aspects of linguistic meaning. As a theory of communication, Relevance Theory provides an account of linguistic meaning with an emphasis on pragmatics, and sets out to account for the on-line process of meaning construction in more detail than it accounts for the stable knowledge systems that comprise knowledge of language or competence in the Chomskyan sense. In this respect, Relevance Theory accepts the distinction between linguistic knowledge and non-linguistic knowledge, and focuses on how the two interact to give rise to interpretation in communicative contexts. This relatively broad focus explains why certain aspects of the model resonate with cognitive approaches, despite starting assumptions that stand in direct opposition to the cognitive view. A further difference relates to the fact that Relevance Theory places the emphasis on communication (the speaker’s intentions and the hearer’s assumptions in deriving inferences), while cognitive semantics emphasises the nature of the conceptual system and conceptual processes. For example, while Relevance Theory emphasises the communicative aspects of metaphor, conceptual metaphor theorists emphasise the structural dimensions of metaphor within the conceptual system. Finally, each approach focuses on a largely distinct range of phenomena. Relevance Theory, although it develops a new perspective, is nevertheless concerned with accounting for the phenomena that have traditionally been of concern within approaches to linguistic meaning, such as ambiguity, the nature of the relationships between word meaning and sentence meaning, between explicit and implicit meaning, and between literal and figurative language. In contrast, cognitive semantics addresses a wider range of phenomena, and is concerned not only with addressing long-standing concerns within approaches to linguistic meaning, but also with phenomena revealed by other related disciplines that cast light upon the nature of the conceptual system.
