Is Relevance Theory relevant to rhetoric?
Chris Cocchiarella and I are working on a book review of Meaning and Relevance (M&R), the 2012 collection of scholarly essays in linguistic pragmatics by Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber, who present relevance theory (RT), a cognitive, as opposed to merely linguistic, theory of communication. By a ‘cognitive’ theory, they mean not only the process of decoding meaning, which would be a purely ‘linguistic’ theory, but also the parallel process of inferential comprehension, which involves constructing conceptual representations of meaning based on adjusting linguistic codes to a cognitive environment. Wilson and Sperber’s most complete treatment of the subject prior to Read More …