This paper outlines the main assumptions of relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1985, 1995, 1998, 2002, Wilson & Sperber 2002), an inferential approach to pragmatics. Relevance theory is based on a definition of relevance and two principles of relevance: a Cognitive Principle (that human cognition is geared to the maximisation of relevance), and a Communicative Principle (that utterances create expectations of optimal relevance). We explain the motivation for these principles and illustrate their application to a variety of pragmatic problems. We end by considering the implications of this relevance-theoretic approach for the architecture of the mind. 1

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The central problem for pragmatics is that sentence meaning vastly underdetermines speaker’s meaning. The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning is bridged. This paper defends the broadly Gricean view that pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in mind-reading, involving the inferential attribution of intentions. We argue, however, that the interpretation process does not simply consist in applying general mind-reading abilities to a particular (communicative) domain. Rather, it involves a dedicated comprehension module, with its own special principles and mechanisms. We show how such a metacommunicative module might have evolved, and what principles and mechanisms it might contain.

We propose that humans are adapted to transfer knowledge to, and receive knowledge from, conspecifics by teaching. This adaptation, which we call 'pedagogy', involves the emergence of a special communication system that does not presuppose either language or high-level theory of mind, but could itself provide a basis facilitating the development of these human-specific abilities both in phylogenetic and ontogenetic terms. We speculate that tool manufacturing and mediated tool use made the evolution of such a new social learning mechanism necessary. However, the main body of evidence supporting this hypothesis comes from developmental psychology. We argue that many central phenomena of human infant social cognition that may seem puzzling in the light of their standard functional explanation can be more coherently and plausibly interpreted as reflecting the adaptations to receive knowledge from social partners through teaching.

Evolution brought brains and minds into a world initially devoid of inteUlgent life. The evolutionary process designed the neural machinery that generates in-tehgent behavior, and important insights into how this machinery works can be gained by understanding how evolution constructs organisms. This is the ratio-nale that underlies research in evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology was founded on interloclang contributions from evolutionary biology, cognitive science, psychology, anthropology, and neuro-science. It reflects an attempt to think through, from first principles, how cur-rent knowledge from these various fields can be integrated into a single, consistent, sciennfic framework for the study of the mind and brain (Cosmides

Grice (1957) drew a famous distinction between natural(N) and non-natural(NN) meaning, where what is meant(NN) is broadly equivalent to what is intentionally communicated. This paper argues that Grice’s dichotomy overlooks the fact that spontaneously occurring natural signs may be intentionally shown, and hence used in intentional communication. It also argues that some naturally occurring behaviours have a signalling function, and that the existence of such natural codes provides further evidence that Grice’s original distinction was not exhaustive. The question of what kind of information, in cognitive terms, these signals encode is also examined. 1

As a post-Gricean pragmatic theory, Relevance Theory (RT) takes as its starting point the question of how hearers bridge the gap between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. That there is such a gap has been a given of linguistic philosophy since Grice’s (1967) Logic and Conversation. But the account that relevance theory offers of how this gap is bridged,

This thesis is about the reconciliation of realistic views of rationality with inferential-intentional theories of communication. Grice (1957; 1975) argued that working out what a speaker meant by an utterance is a matter of inferring the speaker’s intentions on the presumption that she is acting rationally. This is abductive inference: inference to the best explanation for the utterance. Thus an utterance both rationalises and causes the interpretation the hearer constructs. Human rationality is bounded because of our ‘finitary predicament’: we have limited time and resources for computation (Simon, 1957b; Cherniak, 1981). This raises questions about the explanatory status of inferential-intentional pragmatic theories. Gricean derivations of speakers’ intentions seem costly, and generally hearers are not aware of performing explicit reasoning. Utterance interpretation is typically fast and automatic. Is utterance interpretation a species of reasoning, or does the hearer merely act as if reasoning? Within the framework of cognitive science, mental processing is understood as transitions between mental representations. I develop a traditional view of rationality as reasoning ability, where this is essentially the ability to make transitions that preserve rational acceptability. Following Grice (2001), I claim that there is a ‘hard way’ and a ‘quick way’ of reasoning. Work on bounded rationality suggests that much cognitive work is done by heuristics, processes that exploit environmental structure to solve problems at much lower cost than fully explicit calculations. I look at the properties of heuristics that find solutions to open-ended problems such as abductive inference, particularly sequential search heuristics with aspiration-level stopping rules. I draw on relevance theory’s view that the comprehension procedure is a heuristic which exploits environmental regularities due to utterances being offers of information (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). This kind of heuristic, I argue, is the ‘quick way’ that reasoning proceeds in utterance interpretation.

Prosody provides both ‘natural’ and properly linguistic input to utterance comprehension. It contributes not only to overt communication but to covert or accidental forms of information transmission. Its function is typically to convey emotions or attitudes or to alter the salience of available interpretations. How should these aspects of communication be described and explained? This paper takes a relevance-theoretic approach, focusing on four main issues: (a) how should the communication of emotions or attitudes be analysed? (b) how do ‘natural’ prosodic elements contribute to communication? (c) what does prosody encode? (d) what light can prosody shed on the place of pragmatics in the architecture of the mind?

This paper has two main parts. The first is a critical survey of ways in which the explicit/implicit distinction has been and is currently construed in linguistic pragmatics, which reaches the conclusion that the distinction is not to be equated with a semantics/pragmatics distinction but rather concerns a division within communicated contents (or speaker meaning). The second part homes in on one particular way of drawing such a pragmatically-based distinction, the explicature/implicature distinction in Relevance Theory. According to this account, processes of pragmatic enrichment play a major role in the recovery of explicit content and only some of these processes are linguistically triggered, others being entirely pragmatically motivated. I conclude with a brief consideration of the language-communication relation and the limits on explicitness. Key words: what is said, explicit communication, implicit communication, Relevance Theory, free enrichment, semantics, pragmatics, 1. Introduction: Aspects of