1. Presentation No.1
Subject: Pragmatics
Topic: Implicit Meaning:
Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance
Theory Chapter Five
Presented by
Ijaz Ahmed
Supervised by Dr. Iqbal Butt
Discipline: Mphil in Linguistics

2. Determining Relevance
• In this chapter it will be examined the argument set out in
Sperber and Wilson’s major book Relevance:
communication and cognition (second
edition,1995)
• A single principle of relevance is sufficient to explain
the process of utterance understanding
• Sperber and Wilson are not satisfied with the
problematic nature of Gricean implicature. They
want a theory which goes beyond the problematic
and enables addresses to be sure that they have
recovered the most relevant of potentially infinite set
of inferences.

3. Explicature and Implicature Three
examples
• Angel Parking
• What’s noticeable is that even elaborating the
syntactic relation of Angel parking requires
inferences which demand a great deal of real-
world knowledge about angel and what road
sign are for.
• In order to understand what was meant by
displaying this road sign, passing motorists
needed to recover an explicature.

4. Cont………
• Second example:
• Please attend course planning and examiners’
meetings in future
• First impression is panic. I’ve missed meeting
• I am instructed to attend meeting.
• In order to understand what Alice meant by
her message. We need to recover the
appropriate higher level explicature.

5. Cont……..
• Third example:
• Have you seen my book?
• You would need to take a lot of context into
account in order to determine what the speaker
meant by their utterance. If the speaker is your
room mate and you had habit of borrowing her
property without permission, she might be
accusing you of taking her book and the
utterance might be taken as demand for its
return.

6. Third example……..
• But if your tutor said it to you. He may intent
to ask you to read my book and get the true
concept from it.

7. Indeterminacy: the motivation for
enrichment
• Explicature, the inference or series of inferences
that enrich the under-determined form produced
by the speaker to a full propositional form are
motivated by the indeterminacy of language.
• This indeterminacy is a consequence of the
economy of expression which characterizes
natural language. It requires an inferential
process which provides as enriched interpretation
consistent with the context of the utterance and
the speaker’s encyclopedic knowledge

8. The essential principles of
Relevance Theory
• 1: Every utterance comes with a guarantee
of its own particular relevance. Thus to
understand an utterance is to prove its
relevance.
• As Sperber and Wilson say, “An individual’s
particular cognitive goal of a given moment is
always an instance of more general goal
maximizing the relevance of the information
processed (1995:49)

9. Cont……..
• 2 Addressees cannot prove the relevance of
the utterance they hear without taking
context into account. The speaker must make
some assumptions about the hearer’s
cognitive abilities and contextual resources.
• 3 Grammatical linguistic structure, a single
syntactic relation may represent a very wide
range of logical and semantic relations

10. Cont…………..
• 4 The propositional form of an utterance has
been fully elaborated, the utterance may be
regarded as a premise, which taken together
with other, non-linguistic premises available to
the hearer as contextual resources, enable
him to deduce the relevant understanding.
• For example: Have you seen my book?
•

11. Cont……….
• 5 The most accessible interpretation is the
most relevant. This is also the essential
principle
• Context is not treated as given common
ground, but rather as a set of more or less
accessible items of information which are
stored in short-term and encyclopedic
memories or manifest in the physical
environment

12. Procedural encoding
• Procedural encodings are processing instruction to be
applied to conceptual meanings their effect is to make
easier the recovery of the most relevant interpretation
by constraining i.e. limiting.
• Procedural encodings include sentence adverbs like
fortunately and clearly. Disjoints like anyway and after
all and discourse particles like so and therefore. Which
constrain the search for a relevant interpretation by
showing how the propositions to which constrain their
interpretations and conjunctions like but, their main
function is to constrain an assumption warranted by
the proposition that proceed it.

13. Salience and inference
• Most salient interpretation of the sentence you
have just read (but not perhaps of this one ) is its
entailment.
• This realization suggests that we need to research
what determines whether the most salient
assumption will be an explicature derived by
inferential development of the propositional form
of the utterance to a full propositional form or
an implicature derived by inferential alone.

14. Implicature and explicature
• We will call an explicitly communicated
assumption an explicature.
• Any assumption communicated but not explicitly
so, is implicitly communicated it is an
implicature)Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 182).
Because explicatures are an intermediate level of
understanding between what is said and the
implicature that are entirely inferred, the model
provides for the possibility of a failure to
understand on a graded scale at three level
entailment, explicature, implicature

15. Implicated premises and implicated
conclusion
• We will distinguish between two kinds of
implicatures implicated premises and
implicated conclusions (Sperber and Wilson,
1995:195)Sperber and Wilson show that
deriving an implicature from an explicature is
sometimes a two step process which requires
a first implicatuer or implicated premise,
before the consequent implicature, or
implicated conclusion, can be inferred.

16. Speaker judgment and hearer
resources
• The speaker must make some assumption
about the hearer’s cognitive abilities and
contextual resources.

17. Recovering meanings and processing
opportunity
• ‘The organization of the individual’s
encyclopedic memory and the mental activity
in which he is engaged, limit the class of
potential context from which an actual
context can be chosen at any given time’
Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 138 this reminds
us that pressure of time, complexity of
structure, etc

18. Accessibility
• The most accessible interpretation is the most
relevant since ‘A phenomenon is relevant to
an individual to the extent that the effort
required to process it is small’ (Sperber and
Wilson, 1995: 153)
• Of course there are degrees of accessibility
and the means chosen to convey meanings
may have different accessibility properties for
different addressees

19. Conclusion
: At the end it can be concluded that:
• Every utterance comes with a guarantee of its own
particular relevance.
• Addressees cannot prove the relevance of the
utterance they hear without taking context into
account. The speaker must make some assumptions
about the hearer’s cognitive abilities and contextual
resources.
• Grammatical linguistic structure, a single
syntactic relation may represent a very wide range of
logical and semantic relations
• The utterance may be regarded as a premise, which
taken together with other,
• The most accessible interpretation is the most
relevant. This is also the essential principle