BriefReviewontheRelevanceTheory.docVIP

BriefReviewontheRelevanceTheory 　　【Abstract】Relevance theory has had an impact on the study in various disciplines including linguistics，literature and so on. This paper gives a brief review of the relevance theory and two principles of relevance. 　　【Key words】relevance theory； cognitive principle； communicative principle. 　　1. Introduction 　　Relevance theory has been widely accepted and has had an impact on the study in various disciplines，psychology and philosophy since the publication of the book Relevance： Communication and Cognition in1986. In the book，Sperber and Wilson claim that the principles governing inferential communication have their source in some basic facts about human cognition： humans typically pay attention to the most relevant phenomena available to them，construct the most relevant representation of these phenomena，and process these representation in a context that maximize their relevance. 　　2. Definition of relevance 　　Sperber and Wilson （1986） point out that relevance is compatible with human psychology. Thus human cognition is relevance-oriented. Each utterance has different degree of relevance when people communicate and begin to demand the hearer’s attention and create an expectation of relevance. People only pay attention to relevance that best meets their expectation of utterance and deal with the information that they are closely related. They distinguish related information from irrelevant one，and more relevant information from less relevant one. The relevance ensures the hearer to make a reasonable inference in order to reach a correct understanding of what is said. In their book Relevance： Communication and Cognition，Sperber and Wilson adopt two extent-conditions to define relevance： 　　Extent condition 1： an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that its contextual effects in this context are largeExtent condition 2： an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that the effort required to process it in