Wilson and Sperber--Relevance Theory(10)

英语专业毕业论文参考资料,关联理论的外国文献,用于题目为语用学只用

Relevance Theory 255

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Cognitive Principle of Relevance Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance.

It is against this cognitive background that inferential communication takes place.

3 Relevance and communication

The universal cognitive tendency to maximise relevance makes it possible, at least to some extent, to predict and manipulate the mental states of others. Knowing of your tendency to pick out the most relevant stimuli in your environment and process them so as to maximise their relevance, I may be able to produce a stimulus which is likely to attract your attention, to prompt the retrieval of certain contextual assumptions and to point you towards an intended conclusion. For example, I may leave my empty glass in your line of vision, intending you to notice and conclude that I might like another drink. As Grice pointed out, this is not yet a case of inferential communication because, although I did intend to affect your thoughts in a certain way, I gave you no evidence that I had this intention. Inferential communication is not just a matter of intending to affect the thoughts of an audience; it is a matter of getting them to recognise that one has this intention. When I quietly leave my glass in your line of vision, I am not engaging in inferential communication, but merely exploiting your natural cognitive tendency to maximise relevance.

Inferential communication – what relevance theory calls OSTENSIVE-INFERENTIAL COMMUNICATION for reasons that will shortly become apparent – involves an extra layer of intention:

(6) Ostensive-inferential communication

a. The informative intention:

The intention to inform an audience of something.

b. The communicative intention:

The intention to inform the audience of one’s informative intention.8 This is the simpler of two characterisations of ostensive-inferential communication in Sperber & Wilson (1986a): 29, 58, 61. The fuller characterisation involves the notions of MANIFESTNESS and MUTUAL MANIFESTNESS. In particular, we argue that for communication to be truly overt, the communicator’s informative intention must become not merely manifest to the audience (i.e. capable of being recognised and accepted as true, or probably true), but mutually manifest to communicator and audience. On the communicative and informative intentions, see Sperber & Wilson (1986a): 8

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